GeForce GTX 860M vs Radeon R9 280

Intro

Compare those specs to the Radeon R9 280, which uses a 28 nm design. AMD has set the core speed at 933 MHz. The GDDR5 RAM is set to run at a speed of 1250 MHz on this particular card. It features 1792 SPUs along with 112 Texture Address Units and 32 Rasterization Operator Units.

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 280		7961 points
GeForce GTX 860M		4340 points
	Difference: 3621 (83%)

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce GTX 860M		45 Watts
Radeon R9 280		250 Watts
	Difference: 205 Watts (456%)

Memory Bandwidth

The Radeon R9 280 should theoretically perform quite a bit faster than the GeForce GTX 860M in general. (explain)

Radeon R9 280		240000 MB/sec
GeForce GTX 860M		64000 MB/sec
	Difference: 176000 (275%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon R9 280 will be much (approximately 37%) better at anisotropic filtering than the GeForce GTX 860M. (explain)

Radeon R9 280		104496 Mtexels/sec
GeForce GTX 860M		76512 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 27984 (37%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon R9 280 is a lot (approximately 134%) better at AA than the GeForce GTX 860M, and also able to handle higher screen resolutions more effectively. (explain)

Radeon R9 280		29856 Mpixels/sec
GeForce GTX 860M		12752 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 17104 (134%)

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 largest amount of information (measured in megabytes per second) that can be transferred across the external memory interface within a second. The number is worked out by multiplying the bus width by its memory clock speed. If the card has DDR type memory, it should 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 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 per second. This is calculated by multiplying the total texture units of the card by the core clock speed of the chip. The higher the texel rate, the better the video card will be at texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels applied in a second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels the video card can possibly write to its local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is worked out by multiplying the amount of colour ROPs by the the core clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also called Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel output rate is also dependant on quite a few other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the potential to get to the maximum fill rate.