GeForce GTX 980M vs Radeon R9 M280X

Intro

Compare those specifications to the Radeon R9 M280X, which comes with a clock frequency of 900 MHz and a GDDR5 memory speed of 1375 MHz. It also makes use of a 128-bit memory bus, and makes use of a 28 nm design. It features 896 SPUs, 56 Texture Address Units, and 16 Raster Operation Units.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon R9 M280X		75 Watts
GeForce GTX 980M		100 Watts
	Difference: 25 Watts (33%)

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically speaking, the GeForce GTX 980M should be 45% faster than the Radeon R9 M280X overall, because of its greater bandwidth. (explain)

GeForce GTX 980M		128000 MB/sec
Radeon R9 M280X		88000 MB/sec
	Difference: 40000 (45%)

Texel Rate

The GeForce GTX 980M should be a lot (more or less 98%) faster with regards to texture filtering than the Radeon R9 M280X. (explain)

GeForce GTX 980M		99648 Mtexels/sec
Radeon R9 M280X		50400 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 49248 (98%)

Pixel Rate

If using high levels of AA is important to you, then the GeForce GTX 980M is a better choice, by a large margin. (explain)

GeForce GTX 980M		66432 Mpixels/sec
Radeon R9 M280X		14400 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 52032 (361%)

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 MB per second) that can be transferred over the external memory interface within a second. It is calculated by multiplying the bus width by its memory clock speed. If the card has DDR RAM, it must be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher the bandwidth is, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, High Dynamic Range and higher screen resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum amount of texture map elements (texels) that can be processed per second. This number 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 in one second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels the graphics card could possibly write to the local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is calculated by multiplying the amount of colour ROPs by the clock speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also sometimes called Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel fill rate also depends on lots of other factors, especially the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the potential to get to the max fill rate.