GeForce GTX 560 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 specific 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 560		3030 points
	Difference: 4931 (163%)

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce GTX 560		150 Watts
Radeon R9 280		250 Watts
	Difference: 100 Watts (67%)

Memory Bandwidth

The Radeon R9 280 should in theory be much faster than the GeForce GTX 560 in general. (explain)

Radeon R9 280		240000 MB/sec
GeForce GTX 560		128128 MB/sec
	Difference: 111872 (87%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon R9 280 is quite a bit (more or less 130%) faster with regards to anisotropic filtering than the GeForce GTX 560. (explain)

Radeon R9 280		104496 Mtexels/sec
GeForce GTX 560		45360 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 59136 (130%)

Pixel Rate

If using lots of anti-aliasing is important to you, then the Radeon R9 280 is the winner, but only just. (explain)

Radeon R9 280		29856 Mpixels/sec
GeForce GTX 560		25920 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 3936 (15%)

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 largest amount of information (counted in MB per second) that can be transferred past the external memory interface in one second. It's worked out by multiplying the card's interface width by its memory clock speed. If the card has DDR type RAM, it must be multiplied by 2 once again. If DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The better the memory bandwidth, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, HDR and higher screen resolutions.

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

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum number of pixels that the graphics chip could possibly record to the local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is worked out by multiplying the number of Render Output Units by the the core clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - sometimes also referred to as Render Output Units) are responsible for filling the screen with pixels (the image). The actual pixel output rate is also dependant on many other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to reach the max fill rate.