GeForce GTX 280 vs Radeon RX 560

Intro

Compare all that to the Radeon RX 560, which comes with a clock speed of 1175 MHz and a GDDR5 memory speed of 1750 MHz. It also uses a 128-bit memory bus, and makes use of a 14 nm design. It is made up of 1024 SPUs, 64 Texture Address Units, and 16 Raster Operation Units.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon RX 560		80 Watts
GeForce GTX 280		236 Watts
	Difference: 156 Watts (195%)

Memory Bandwidth

Performance-wise, the GeForce GTX 280 should in theory be much superior to the Radeon RX 560 overall. (explain)

GeForce GTX 280		141696 MB/sec
Radeon RX 560		114688 MB/sec
	Difference: 27008 (24%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon RX 560 is quite a bit (about 56%) better at AF than the GeForce GTX 280. (explain)

Radeon RX 560		75200 Mtexels/sec
GeForce GTX 280		48160 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 27040 (56%)

Pixel Rate

The GeForce GTX 280 should be a small bit (more or less 2%) faster with regards to FSAA than the Radeon RX 560, and also should be capable of handling higher resolutions without slowing down too much. (explain)

GeForce GTX 280		19264 Mpixels/sec
Radeon RX 560		18800 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 464 (2%)

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: Memory bandwidth is the maximum amount of data (measured in megabytes per second) that can be transferred across the external memory interface in a second. The number is calculated by multiplying the card's bus width by its memory clock speed. If it uses DDR RAM, it must be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The better the memory bandwidth, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, HDR and higher screen resolutions.

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

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum amount of pixels the video card could possibly write to its local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is calculated by multiplying the number of Raster Operations Pipelines by the the card's clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - sometimes also referred to as 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, especially the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the potential to reach the max fill rate.