GeForce RTX 3080 12 GB vs Radeon R9 280

Intro

Compare all that to the Radeon R9 280, which features clock speeds of 933 MHz on the GPU, and 1250 MHz on the 3072 MB of GDDR5 RAM. It features 1792 SPUs as well as 112 TAUs and 32 ROPs.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon R9 280		250 Watts
GeForce RTX 3080 12 GB		350 Watts
	Difference: 100 Watts (40%)

Memory Bandwidth

In theory, the GeForce RTX 3080 12 GB should be 289% quicker than the Radeon R9 280 in general, due to its greater bandwidth. (explain)

GeForce RTX 3080 12 GB		934298 MB/sec
Radeon R9 280		240000 MB/sec
	Difference: 694298 (289%)

Texel Rate

The GeForce RTX 3080 12 GB is a lot (approximately 238%) more effective at anisotropic filtering than the Radeon R9 280. (explain)

GeForce RTX 3080 12 GB		352800 Mtexels/sec
Radeon R9 280		104496 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 248304 (238%)

Pixel Rate

If running with a high resolution is important to you, then the GeForce RTX 3080 12 GB is the winner, by a large margin. (explain)

GeForce RTX 3080 12 GB		141120 Mpixels/sec
Radeon R9 280		29856 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 111264 (373%)

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 (measured in MB per second) that can be moved past the external memory interface in a second. The number is calculated by multiplying the card's interface width by its memory clock speed. If the card has DDR RAM, it must be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The better the card's memory bandwidth, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, High Dynamic Range and higher screen resolutions.

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

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum number of pixels that the graphics chip could possibly write to the local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is calculated by multiplying the number of colour ROPs by the clock speed of the card. 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 output rate also depends on quite a few other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the ability to reach the maximum fill rate.