GeForce GTX Titan Black vs Radeon R9 280X

Intro

Compare all that to the Radeon R9 280X, which has core clock speeds of 850 MHz on the GPU, and 1500 MHz on the 3072 MB of GDDR5 RAM. It features 2048 SPUs as well as 128 Texture Address Units and 32 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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Benchmarks

These are real-world performance benchmarks that were submitted by Hardware Compare users. The scores seen here are the average of all benchmarks submitted for each respective test and hardware.

3DMark Fire Strike Graphics Score

GeForce GTX Titan Black		11666 points
Radeon R9 280X		8886 points
	Difference: 2780 (31%)

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Both cards have the same power consumption.

Memory Bandwidth

Performance-wise, the GeForce GTX Titan Black should theoretically be a small bit superior to the Radeon R9 280X in general. (explain)

GeForce GTX Titan Black		336000 MB/sec
Radeon R9 280X		288000 MB/sec
	Difference: 48000 (17%)

Texel Rate

The GeForce GTX Titan Black is a lot (approximately 96%) more effective at anisotropic filtering than the Radeon R9 280X. (explain)

GeForce GTX Titan Black		213360 Mtexels/sec
Radeon R9 280X		108800 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 104560 (96%)

Pixel Rate

If running with a high screen resolution is important to you, then the GeForce GTX Titan Black is superior to the Radeon R9 280X, by far. (explain)

GeForce GTX Titan Black		42672 Mpixels/sec
Radeon R9 280X		27200 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 15472 (57%)

Please note that the above 'benchmarks' are all just theoretical - the results were calculated based on the card's specifications, and real-world performance may (and probably will) vary at least a bit.

Price Comparison

Specifications

Memory Bandwidth: Memory bandwidth is the max amount of information (measured in megabytes per second) that can be transferred over the external memory interface within a second. It's worked out by multiplying the card's bus width by its memory clock speed. If the card has DDR memory, the result should be multiplied by 2 once again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher the bandwidth is, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, High Dynamic Range and higher screen resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum amount of texture map elements (texels) that are processed per second. This is worked out by multiplying the total number of texture units by the core speed of the chip. The better this number, the better the graphics card will be at handling texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels processed in one second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels the video card can possibly write to the local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is worked out by multiplying the number of ROPs by the the core speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - aka Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel output rate is also dependant on lots of other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the ability to get to the max fill rate.