GeForce GTX 980 vs Radeon R9 M280X

Intro

The GeForce GTX 980 makes use of a 28 nm design. nVidia has set the core speed at 1126 MHz. The GDDR5 RAM is set to run at a frequency of 1750 MHz on this particular model. It features 2048 SPUs as well as 128 Texture Address Units and 64 Rasterization Operator Units.

Compare all of that to the Radeon R9 M280X, which comes with GPU clock speed of 900 MHz, and 4096 MB of GDDR5 memory set to run at 1375 MHz through a 128-bit bus. It also is comprised of 896 Stream Processors, 56 TAUs, and 16 ROPs.

Price Comparison

Specifications

Memory Bandwidth: Memory bandwidth is the max amount of data (counted in MB per second) that can be transported over the external memory interface in a second. The number is worked out by multiplying the card's bus width by its memory speed. If it uses DDR type memory, the result should be multiplied by 2 once again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher the bandwidth is, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, High Dynamic Range and high 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 higher this number, the better the graphics 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 maximum amount of pixels the graphics card can possibly record to the local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is worked out by multiplying the number of Render Output Units by the clock speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also sometimes called 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, most notably the memory bandwidth - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the potential to get to the maximum fill rate.