GeForce RTX 3050 vs Radeon R9 280

Intro

Compare those specs to the Radeon R9 280, which comes with a clock speed of 933 MHz and a GDDR5 memory frequency of 1250 MHz. It also uses a 384-bit memory bus, and makes use of a 28 nm design. It is made up of 1792 SPUs, 112 Texture Address Units, and 32 ROPs.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce RTX 3050		130 Watts
Radeon R9 280		250 Watts
	Difference: 120 Watts (92%)

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically speaking, the Radeon R9 280 is 5% faster than the GeForce RTX 3050 overall, due to its greater data rate. (explain)

Radeon R9 280		240000 MB/sec
GeForce RTX 3050		229376 MB/sec
	Difference: 10624 (5%)

Texel Rate

The GeForce RTX 3050 will be a little bit (about 19%) better at AF than the Radeon R9 280. (explain)

GeForce RTX 3050		124160 Mtexels/sec
Radeon R9 280		104496 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 19664 (19%)

Pixel Rate

The GeForce RTX 3050 should be quite a bit (approximately 66%) more effective at anti-aliasing than the Radeon R9 280, and should be able to handle higher screen resolutions without slowing down too much. (explain)

GeForce RTX 3050		49664 Mpixels/sec
Radeon R9 280		29856 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 19808 (66%)

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 information (measured in MB per second) that can be transported past the external memory interface in a second. It's worked out by multiplying the bus width by its memory clock speed. In the case of DDR type RAM, the result should be multiplied by 2 once again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The better the bandwidth is, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, High Dynamic Range and higher screen resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum texture map elements (texels) that are 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 better this number, the better the graphics card will be at handling texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels applied in one second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum number of pixels that the graphics card could possibly record to the local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is calculated by multiplying the amount of ROPs by the the core clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - aka Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel fill rate is also dependant on lots of other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the ability to get to the max fill rate.