GeForce GTX 280 vs Radeon R9 380 4G

Intro

Compare those specifications to the Radeon R9 380 4G, which has a clock speed of 970 MHz and a GDDR5 memory speed of 1425 MHz. It also makes use of a 256-bit memory bus, and uses a 28 nm design. It is comprised of 1792 SPUs, 112 Texture Address Units, and 32 Raster Operation Units.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon R9 380 4G		190 Watts
GeForce GTX 280		236 Watts
	Difference: 46 Watts (24%)

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically speaking, the Radeon R9 380 4G is 29% faster than the GeForce GTX 280 in general, because of its higher data rate. (explain)

Radeon R9 380 4G		182400 MB/sec
GeForce GTX 280		141696 MB/sec
	Difference: 40704 (29%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon R9 380 4G is much (more or less 126%) more effective at AF than the GeForce GTX 280. (explain)

Radeon R9 380 4G		108640 Mtexels/sec
GeForce GTX 280		48160 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 60480 (126%)

Pixel Rate

If running with high levels of AA is important to you, then the Radeon R9 380 4G is the winner, and very much so. (explain)

Radeon R9 380 4G		31040 Mpixels/sec
GeForce GTX 280		19264 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 11776 (61%)

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 data (measured in megabytes per second) that can be moved past the external memory interface in one second. The number is worked out by multiplying the bus width by its memory speed. If the card has DDR memory, the result should be multiplied by 2 again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher the card's memory bandwidth, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, HDR and high resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum texture map elements (texels) that can be processed per 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 applied in a second.

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