GeForce GTX 580 3GB vs Radeon R9 280

Intro

Compare all that to the Radeon R9 280, which comes with a clock speed of 933 MHz and a GDDR5 memory frequency of 1250 MHz. It also uses a 384-bit bus, and uses a 28 nm design. It is made up of 1792 SPUs, 112 Texture Address Units, and 32 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce GTX 580 3GB		244 Watts
Radeon R9 280		250 Watts
	Difference: 6 Watts (2%)

Memory Bandwidth

Performance-wise, the Radeon R9 280 should theoretically be much superior to the GeForce GTX 580 3GB overall. (explain)

Radeon R9 280		240000 MB/sec
GeForce GTX 580 3GB		192384 MB/sec
	Difference: 47616 (25%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon R9 280 should be a lot (approximately 111%) better at anisotropic filtering than the GeForce GTX 580 3GB. (explain)

Radeon R9 280		104496 Mtexels/sec
GeForce GTX 580 3GB		49408 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 55088 (111%)

Pixel Rate

If using high levels of AA is important to you, then the GeForce GTX 580 3GB is the winner, by a large margin. (explain)

GeForce GTX 580 3GB		37056 Mpixels/sec
Radeon R9 280		29856 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 7200 (24%)

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: Bandwidth is the largest amount of data (measured in MB per second) that can be moved past the external memory interface in one second. It's worked out by multiplying the bus width by its memory speed. If it uses DDR type memory, the result should be multiplied by 2 once again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The better the 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 worked out by multiplying the total amount of texture units of the card 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 processed in one second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum number of pixels the video card can possibly write to its local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is calculated by multiplying the number of Raster Operations Pipelines by the the core 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 is also dependant on many other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the ability to get to the maximum fill rate.