GeForce GTX 980 vs Radeon R9 280

Intro

Compare all of that to the Radeon R9 280, which uses a 28 nm design. AMD has set the core frequency at 933 MHz. The GDDR5 RAM works at a frequency of 1250 MHz on this model. It features 1792 SPUs as well as 112 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 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

Theoretically speaking, the Radeon R9 280 should be 7% faster than the GeForce GTX 980 overall, because of its higher data rate. (explain)

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

Texel Rate

The GeForce GTX 980 will be much (more or less 38%) better at texture 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 should be much (more or less 141%) faster with regards to FSAA than the Radeon R9 280, and also should be 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: Bandwidth is the max amount of information (measured in megabytes per second) that can be moved across the external memory interface in a second. The number is worked out by multiplying the bus width by its memory clock speed. If the card has DDR RAM, the result should 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 processed in one second. This is calculated by multiplying the total amount of texture units by the core speed of the chip. The better this number, the better the card will be at texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels in a second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum number of pixels that the graphics card could possibly write to the local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is calculated by multiplying the amount of ROPs by the the core clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also called Render Output Units) are responsible for filling the screen with pixels (the image). The actual pixel output rate also depends on many other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to get to the maximum fill rate.