GeForce 820M vs Radeon R9 280X

Intro

Compare those specs to the Radeon R9 280X, which uses a 28 nm design. AMD has set the core speed at 850 MHz. The GDDR5 RAM is set to run at a frequency of 1500 MHz on this particular card. It features 2048 SPUs as well as 128 TAUs and 32 ROPs.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Benchmarks

These are real-world performance benchmarks that were submitted by Hardware Compare users. The scores seen here are the average of all benchmarks submitted for each respective test and hardware.

3DMark Fire Strike Graphics Score

Radeon R9 280X		8886 points
GeForce 820M		850 points
	Difference: 8036 (945%)

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce 820M		15 Watts
Radeon R9 280X		250 Watts
	Difference: 235 Watts (1567%)

Memory Bandwidth

In theory, the Radeon R9 280X should be much faster than the GeForce 820M overall. (explain)

Radeon R9 280X		288000 MB/sec
GeForce 820M		16000 MB/sec
	Difference: 272000 (1700%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon R9 280X will be quite a bit (more or less 846%) more effective at anisotropic filtering than the GeForce 820M. (explain)

Radeon R9 280X		108800 Mtexels/sec
GeForce 820M		11504 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 97296 (846%)

Pixel Rate

If running with a high screen resolution is important to you, then the Radeon R9 280X is a better choice, by far. (explain)

Radeon R9 280X		27200 Mpixels/sec
GeForce 820M		2876 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 24324 (846%)

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 a second. It is calculated by multiplying the card's bus width by its memory speed. If the card has DDR type memory, it should be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The better the memory bandwidth, 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 texture map elements (texels) that can be applied in one second. This is worked out by multiplying the total amount of texture units of the card by the core speed of the chip. The higher the texel rate, the better the graphics card will be at texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels processed per second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum amount of pixels the graphics card could possibly record to the local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is calculated by multiplying the amount of ROPs by the the core speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - aka Render Output Units) are responsible for filling the screen with pixels (the image). The actual pixel fill rate also depends on lots of other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to reach the max fill rate.