GeForce 8800 GTX vs Radeon R9 M280X

Intro

Compare that to the Radeon R9 M280X, which features GPU core speed of 900 MHz, and 4096 MB of GDDR5 memory set to run at 1375 MHz through a 128-bit bus. It also is made up of 896 SPUs, 56 Texture Address Units, and 16 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon R9 M280X		75 Watts
GeForce 8800 GTX		155 Watts
	Difference: 80 Watts (107%)

Memory Bandwidth

The Radeon R9 M280X, in theory, should be a bit faster than the GeForce 8800 GTX overall. (explain)

Radeon R9 M280X		88000 MB/sec
GeForce 8800 GTX		86400 MB/sec
	Difference: 1600 (2%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon R9 M280X will be a lot (more or less 37%) more effective at AF than the GeForce 8800 GTX. (explain)

Radeon R9 M280X		50400 Mtexels/sec
GeForce 8800 GTX		36800 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 13600 (37%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon R9 M280X will be a small bit (about 4%) more effective at full screen anti-aliasing than the GeForce 8800 GTX, and should be capable of handling higher resolutions without slowing down too much. (explain)

Radeon R9 M280X		14400 Mpixels/sec
GeForce 8800 GTX		13800 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 600 (4%)

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 data (counted in megabytes per second) that can be transported over the external memory interface in one second. It is calculated by multiplying the card's interface width by its memory speed. If it uses DDR RAM, it must be multiplied by 2 once again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher the card's memory bandwidth, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, High Dynamic Range and high resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum amount of texture map elements (texels) that can be applied in one second. This number is calculated by multiplying the total number of texture units of the card by the core speed of the chip. The higher the texel rate, the better the video card will be at handling texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels per second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum number of pixels that the graphics card can possibly write to the local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure 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 outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel output rate also depends on many other factors, especially the memory bandwidth - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the ability to get to the maximum fill rate.