GeForce GTX 1060 vs Radeon R9 280X

Intro

Compare those specifications to the Radeon R9 280X, which uses a 28 nm design. AMD has clocked the core speed at 850 MHz. The GDDR5 RAM works at a speed of 1500 MHz on this specific model. It features 2048 SPUs as well as 128 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.

Zcash Mining Hash Rate

GeForce GTX 1060		311 Sol/s
Radeon R9 280X		294 Sol/s
	Difference: 17 (6%)

3DMark Fire Strike Graphics Score

GeForce GTX 1060		12359 points
Radeon R9 280X		8886 points
	Difference: 3473 (39%)

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce GTX 1060		120 Watts
Radeon R9 280X		250 Watts
	Difference: 130 Watts (108%)

Memory Bandwidth

Performance-wise, the Radeon R9 280X should theoretically be a lot superior to the GeForce GTX 1060 in general. (explain)

Radeon R9 280X		288000 MB/sec
GeForce GTX 1060		196608 MB/sec
	Difference: 91392 (46%)

Texel Rate

The GeForce GTX 1060 is a small bit (more or less 11%) better at anisotropic filtering than the Radeon R9 280X. (explain)

GeForce GTX 1060		120480 Mtexels/sec
Radeon R9 280X		108800 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 11680 (11%)

Pixel Rate

If using a high screen resolution is important to you, then the GeForce GTX 1060 is a better choice, and very much so. (explain)

GeForce GTX 1060		72288 Mpixels/sec
Radeon R9 280X		27200 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 45088 (166%)

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 max amount of information (in units of MB per second) that can be transferred past the external memory interface within a second. The number is calculated by multiplying the card's interface width by its memory clock speed. In the case of DDR RAM, it must be multiplied by 2 once again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. 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 texture map elements (texels) that can be processed in one second. This figure is calculated by multiplying the total number of texture units by the core clock speed of the chip. The higher this number, the better the card will be at texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels per second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels that the graphics chip could 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 colour ROPs by the clock speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also sometimes called Render Output Units) are responsible for drawing the pixels (image) on the screen. The actual pixel rate is also dependant on quite a few other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the ability to reach the max fill rate.