GeForce GTX 280 vs Radeon RX 480 4GB

Intro

Compare all that to the Radeon RX 480 4GB, which features core clock speeds of 1120 MHz on the GPU, and 1750 MHz on the 4096 MB of GDDR5 memory. It features 2304 SPUs along with 144 Texture Address Units and 32 ROPs.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon RX 480 4GB		150 Watts
GeForce GTX 280		236 Watts
	Difference: 86 Watts (57%)

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically speaking, the Radeon RX 480 4GB is 62% faster than the GeForce GTX 280 in general, because of its higher bandwidth. (explain)

Radeon RX 480 4GB		229376 MB/sec
GeForce GTX 280		141696 MB/sec
	Difference: 87680 (62%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon RX 480 4GB should be quite a bit (more or less 235%) better at AF than the GeForce GTX 280. (explain)

Radeon RX 480 4GB		161280 Mtexels/sec
GeForce GTX 280		48160 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 113120 (235%)

Pixel Rate

If using a high resolution is important to you, then the Radeon RX 480 4GB is superior to the GeForce GTX 280, by far. (explain)

Radeon RX 480 4GB		35840 Mpixels/sec
GeForce GTX 280		19264 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 16576 (86%)

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 information (counted in MB per second) that can be moved across the external memory interface in a second. It's worked out by multiplying the bus width by its memory clock speed. If it uses DDR RAM, it should be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher the bandwidth is, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, HDR and higher screen resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum amount of texture map elements (texels) that can be processed per second. This figure is calculated by multiplying the total texture units by the core speed of the chip. The better this number, the better the card will be at texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels processed in one second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum amount of pixels the graphics card can possibly record to the local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is worked out by multiplying the number of Render Output Units by the the core clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also sometimes called Render Output Units) are responsible for filling the screen with pixels (the image). The actual pixel fill rate also depends on many other factors, especially the memory bandwidth - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the ability to get to the max fill rate.