GeForce GTX 280 vs Radeon R9 M395X

Intro

Compare those specs to the Radeon R9 M395X, which comes with GPU core speed of 723 MHz, and 4096 MB of GDDR5 memory set to run at 1250 MHz through a 256-bit bus. It also is made up of 2048 Stream Processors, 128 Texture Address Units, and 32 Raster Operation Units.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon R9 M395X		125 Watts
GeForce GTX 280		236 Watts
	Difference: 111 Watts (89%)

Memory Bandwidth

Performance-wise, the Radeon R9 M395X should theoretically be a little bit better than the GeForce GTX 280 in general. (explain)

Radeon R9 M395X		160000 MB/sec
GeForce GTX 280		141696 MB/sec
	Difference: 18304 (13%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon R9 M395X should be a lot (approximately 92%) faster with regards to anisotropic filtering than the GeForce GTX 280. (explain)

Radeon R9 M395X		92544 Mtexels/sec
GeForce GTX 280		48160 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 44384 (92%)

Pixel Rate

If using a high resolution is important to you, then the Radeon R9 M395X is superior to the GeForce GTX 280, though only just barely. (explain)

Radeon R9 M395X		23136 Mpixels/sec
GeForce GTX 280		19264 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 3872 (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 maximum amount of data (measured in megabytes per second) that can be transported over the external memory interface within a second. It's calculated by multiplying the card's bus width by its memory clock speed. If it uses DDR memory, it must be multiplied by 2 once again. If DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The higher the bandwidth is, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, HDR 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 worked out by multiplying the total texture units by the core speed of the chip. The higher this number, the better the video card will be at texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels in a second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum amount of pixels that the graphics chip could possibly record to its local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is calculated by multiplying the amount of colour ROPs by the clock speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also called Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel output rate also depends on quite a few other factors, especially the memory bandwidth - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the ability to get to the max fill rate.