Geforce GTX 690 vs Radeon R9 280

Intro

Compare that to the Radeon R9 280, which uses a 28 nm design. AMD has clocked the core frequency at 933 MHz. The GDDR5 RAM works at a speed of 1250 MHz on this card. It features 1792 SPUs as well as 112 Texture Address Units and 32 ROPs.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

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 690		13111 points
Radeon R9 280		7961 points
	Difference: 5150 (65%)

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon R9 280		250 Watts
Geforce GTX 690		300 Watts
	Difference: 50 Watts (20%)

Memory Bandwidth

Performance-wise, the Geforce GTX 690 should in theory be quite a bit superior to the Radeon R9 280 in general. (explain)

Geforce GTX 690		384512 MB/sec
Radeon R9 280		240000 MB/sec
	Difference: 144512 (60%)

Texel Rate

The Geforce GTX 690 will be quite a bit (approximately 124%) more effective at anisotropic filtering than the Radeon R9 280. (explain)

Geforce GTX 690		234240 Mtexels/sec
Radeon R9 280		104496 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 129744 (124%)

Pixel Rate

If running with a high screen resolution is important to you, then the Geforce GTX 690 is the winner, by a large margin. (explain)

Geforce GTX 690		58560 Mpixels/sec
Radeon R9 280		29856 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 28704 (96%)

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.

One or more cards in this comparison are multi-core. This means that their bandwidth, texel and pixel rates are theoretically doubled - this does not mean the card will actually perform twice as fast, but only that it should in theory be able to. Actual game benchmarks will give a more accurate idea of what it's capable of.

Price Comparison

Specifications

Memory Bandwidth: Bandwidth is the maximum amount of data (in units of MB per second) that can be moved across the external memory interface within a second. It is calculated by multiplying the interface width by the speed of its memory. If it uses DDR memory, it must be multiplied by 2 once again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher the bandwidth is, the better 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 number of texture map elements (texels) that are applied in one second. This is calculated by multiplying the total amount of texture units by the core speed of the chip. The better this number, the better the card will be at texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels per second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum number of pixels the graphics card could possibly record to its local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is calculated by multiplying the number of Render Output Units by the clock speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also sometimes called Render Output Units) are responsible for drawing the pixels (image) on the screen. The actual pixel fill rate also depends on lots of other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the ability to reach the maximum fill rate.