GeForce GTX 980 vs Radeon R9 280

Intro

Compare those specs to the Radeon R9 280, which has clock speeds of 933 MHz on the GPU, and 1250 MHz on the 3072 MB of GDDR5 memory. It features 1792 SPUs along with 112 Texture Address Units and 32 Rasterization Operator Units.

Display Graphs

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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 980		13552 points
Radeon R9 280		7961 points
	Difference: 5591 (70%)

Ethereum Mining Hash Rate

Radeon R9 280		22 Mh/s
GeForce GTX 980		20 Mh/s
	Difference: 2 (10%)

Zcash Mining Hash Rate

GeForce GTX 980		408 Sol/s
Radeon R9 280		183 Sol/s
	Difference: 225 (123%)

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce GTX 980		165 Watts
Radeon R9 280		250 Watts
	Difference: 85 Watts (52%)

Memory Bandwidth

The Radeon R9 280 should in theory be a small bit faster than the GeForce GTX 980 in general. (explain)

Radeon R9 280		240000 MB/sec
GeForce GTX 980		224000 MB/sec
	Difference: 16000 (7%)

Texel Rate

The GeForce GTX 980 should be much (about 38%) better at anisotropic filtering than the Radeon R9 280. (explain)

GeForce GTX 980		144128 Mtexels/sec
Radeon R9 280		104496 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 39632 (38%)

Pixel Rate

The GeForce GTX 980 will be much (about 141%) more effective at AA than the Radeon R9 280, and able to handle higher resolutions better. (explain)

GeForce GTX 980		72064 Mpixels/sec
Radeon R9 280		29856 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 42208 (141%)

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 information (measured in MB per second) that can be transferred over the external memory interface in a second. The number is calculated by multiplying the bus width by its memory speed. If it uses DDR RAM, it should be multiplied by 2 again. If DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The higher the bandwidth is, 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 texture map elements (texels) that can be applied per second. This figure is worked out by multiplying the total amount of texture units by the core speed of the chip. The higher this number, the better the graphics card will be at texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels processed in one second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum amount of pixels the graphics card could possibly record to its local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is worked out by multiplying the number of ROPs by the the card's clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - sometimes also referred to as Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel rate also depends on many other factors, especially the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the ability to get to the maximum fill rate.