GeForce GTX 280 vs Radeon R9 M270X

Intro

Compare that to the Radeon R9 M270X, which uses a 28 nm design. AMD has clocked the core frequency at 725 MHz. The GDDR5 RAM is set to run at a speed of 1125 MHz on this specific model. It features 640 SPUs along with 40 Texture Address Units and 16 ROPs.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Memory Bandwidth

In theory, the GeForce GTX 280 should be much faster than the Radeon R9 M270X overall. (explain)

GeForce GTX 280		141696 MB/sec
Radeon R9 M270X		72000 MB/sec
	Difference: 69696 (97%)

Texel Rate

The GeForce GTX 280 should be a lot (more or less 66%) better at anisotropic filtering than the Radeon R9 M270X. (explain)

GeForce GTX 280		48160 Mtexels/sec
Radeon R9 M270X		29000 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 19160 (66%)

Pixel Rate

If using a high screen resolution is important to you, then the GeForce GTX 280 is a better choice, and very much so. (explain)

GeForce GTX 280		19264 Mpixels/sec
Radeon R9 M270X		11600 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 7664 (66%)

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 max amount of data (in units of megabytes per second) that can be moved past the external memory interface in one second. It is calculated by multiplying the card's interface width by its memory speed. If the card has DDR RAM, the result should be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The better 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 number of texture map elements (texels) that can be applied per second. This is calculated by multiplying the total texture units of the card by the core speed of the chip. The better the texel rate, the better the card will be at handling texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels processed in a second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum number of pixels that the graphics chip could possibly write to the local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is worked out by multiplying the amount of Raster Operations Pipelines by the clock speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - sometimes also referred to as Render Output Units) are responsible for drawing the pixels (image) on the screen. The actual pixel output rate is also dependant on quite a few other factors, especially the memory bandwidth - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to reach the maximum fill rate.