GeForce GTX 970 vs Radeon R9 280X

Intro

Compare those specifications to the Radeon R9 280X, which comes with a clock frequency of 850 MHz and a GDDR5 memory speed of 1500 MHz. It also uses a 384-bit memory bus, and uses a 28 nm design. It is made up of 2048 SPUs, 128 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 970		10867 points
Radeon R9 280X		8886 points
	Difference: 1981 (22%)

Zcash Mining Hash Rate

Radeon R9 280X		294 Sol/s
GeForce GTX 970		262 Sol/s
	Difference: 32 (12%)

Ethereum Mining Hash Rate

Radeon R9 280X		21 Mh/s
GeForce GTX 970		19 Mh/s
	Difference: 2 (11%)

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce GTX 970		145 Watts
Radeon R9 280X		250 Watts
	Difference: 105 Watts (72%)

Memory Bandwidth

In theory, the Radeon R9 280X should perform quite a bit faster than the GeForce GTX 970 overall. (explain)

Radeon R9 280X		288000 MB/sec
GeForce GTX 970		224000 MB/sec
	Difference: 64000 (29%)

Texel Rate

The GeForce GTX 970 is a little bit (approximately 0%) faster with regards to texture filtering than the Radeon R9 280X. (explain)

GeForce GTX 970		109200 Mtexels/sec
Radeon R9 280X		108800 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 400 (0%)

Pixel Rate

The GeForce GTX 970 will be much (more or less 147%) more effective at FSAA than the Radeon R9 280X, and will be capable of handling higher screen resolutions more effectively. (explain)

GeForce GTX 970		67200 Mpixels/sec
Radeon R9 280X		27200 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 40000 (147%)

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 maximum amount of information (counted in megabytes per second) that can be transferred across the external memory interface in a second. It's worked out by multiplying the bus width by its memory clock speed. If it uses DDR type memory, it should be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The better the bandwidth is, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, High Dynamic Range and high resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum amount of texture map elements (texels) that are applied per second. This figure 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 video 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 that the graphics card can possibly write to the local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is worked out by multiplying the number of colour ROPs by the the card's 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 fill rate also depends on quite a few other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the ability to reach the max fill rate.