Geforce GTX 680 vs Radeon R9 285

Intro

Compare those specs to the Radeon R9 285, which makes use of a 28 nm design. AMD has clocked the core speed at 918 MHz. The GDDR5 RAM is set to run at a speed of 1375 MHz on this particular model. It features 1792 SPUs along with 112 TAUs and 32 Rasterization Operator Units.

Display Graphs

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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 285		8500 points
Geforce GTX 680		7650 points
	Difference: 850 (11%)

Ethereum Mining Hash Rate

Radeon R9 285		18 Mh/s
Geforce GTX 680		16 Mh/s
	Difference: 2 (13%)

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon R9 285		190 Watts
Geforce GTX 680		195 Watts
	Difference: 5 Watts (3%)

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically, the Geforce GTX 680 should be a bit faster than the Radeon R9 285 overall. (explain)

Geforce GTX 680		192256 MB/sec
Radeon R9 285		176000 MB/sec
	Difference: 16256 (9%)

Texel Rate

The Geforce GTX 680 will be much (about 25%) more effective at anisotropic filtering than the Radeon R9 285. (explain)

Geforce GTX 680		128768 Mtexels/sec
Radeon R9 285		102816 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 25952 (25%)

Pixel Rate

If using high levels of AA is important to you, then the Geforce GTX 680 is a better choice, though not by far. (explain)

Geforce GTX 680		32192 Mpixels/sec
Radeon R9 285		29376 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 2816 (10%)

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 (in units of megabytes per second) that can be transferred past the external memory interface in one second. It is calculated by multiplying the card's bus width by the speed of its memory. If it uses DDR type memory, it must be multiplied by 2 once again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher the bandwidth is, 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 processed per second. This number is worked out by multiplying the total number of 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 applied per second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels that the graphics card can possibly write to its local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is calculated by multiplying the amount of Raster Operations Pipelines by the the card's clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - aka Render Output Units) are responsible for filling the screen with pixels (the image). The actual pixel 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 potential to reach the max fill rate.