Geforce GTX 680 vs Radeon R9 280

Intro

Compare all that to the Radeon R9 280, which uses a 28 nm design. AMD has clocked the core speed at 933 MHz. The GDDR5 memory runs at a speed of 1250 MHz on this card. It features 1792 SPUs along with 112 Texture Address Units and 32 Rasterization Operator Units.

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

Radeon R9 280		7961 points
Geforce GTX 680		7650 points
	Difference: 311 (4%)

Ethereum Mining Hash Rate

Radeon R9 280		22 Mh/s
Geforce GTX 680		16 Mh/s
	Difference: 6 (38%)

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Geforce GTX 680		195 Watts
Radeon R9 280		250 Watts
	Difference: 55 Watts (28%)

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically, the Radeon R9 280 should perform quite a bit faster than the Geforce GTX 680 overall. (explain)

Radeon R9 280		240000 MB/sec
Geforce GTX 680		192256 MB/sec
	Difference: 47744 (25%)

Texel Rate

The Geforce GTX 680 should be a lot (about 23%) better at anisotropic filtering than the Radeon R9 280. (explain)

Geforce GTX 680		128768 Mtexels/sec
Radeon R9 280		104496 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 24272 (23%)

Pixel Rate

The Geforce GTX 680 should be a small bit (about 8%) faster with regards to full screen anti-aliasing than the Radeon R9 280, and should be capable of handling higher screen resolutions more effectively. (explain)

Geforce GTX 680		32192 Mpixels/sec
Radeon R9 280		29856 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 2336 (8%)

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 maximum amount of data (measured in megabytes per second) that can be transferred past the external memory interface in a second. It is calculated by multiplying the card's interface width by the speed of its memory. If the card has DDR type memory, it should be multiplied by 2 once again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The higher the card's memory bandwidth, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, High Dynamic Range and higher screen resolutions.

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

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels that the graphics card could possibly write to its local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is calculated by multiplying the amount of Render Output Units by the the card's clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also sometimes called Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel output rate is also dependant on many other factors, especially the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the ability to get to the max fill rate.