GeForce GTX 280 vs Radeon R9 M380

Intro

Compare that to the Radeon R9 M380, which makes use of a 28 nm design. AMD has set the core speed at 1000 MHz. The GDDR5 RAM works at a speed of 1500 MHz on this specific card. It features 640 SPUs along with 40 Texture Address Units and 16 ROPs.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically speaking, the GeForce GTX 280 should perform much faster than the Radeon R9 M380 overall. (explain)

GeForce GTX 280		141696 MB/sec
Radeon R9 M380		96000 MB/sec
	Difference: 45696 (48%)

Texel Rate

The GeForce GTX 280 is just a bit (approximately 20%) more effective at anisotropic filtering than the Radeon R9 M380. (explain)

GeForce GTX 280		48160 Mtexels/sec
Radeon R9 M380		40000 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 8160 (20%)

Pixel Rate

If using a high screen resolution is important to you, then the GeForce GTX 280 is superior to the Radeon R9 M380, but it probably won't make a huge difference. (explain)

GeForce GTX 280		19264 Mpixels/sec
Radeon R9 M380		16000 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 3264 (20%)

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 data (measured in MB per second) that can be transferred over the external memory interface within a second. It's worked out by multiplying the interface width by its memory clock speed. If it uses DDR type RAM, it must be multiplied by 2 once again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The higher the memory bandwidth, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, High Dynamic Range and high resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum number of texture map elements (texels) that are processed per second. This is calculated 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 handling texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels processed per second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum number of pixels the graphics card can possibly record 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 clock speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also sometimes called Render Output Units) are responsible for filling the screen with pixels (the image). The actual pixel output rate also depends on quite a few other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the ability to reach the max fill rate.