Geforce GTX 690 vs Radeon R9 280

Intro

Compare those specifications to the Radeon R9 280, which makes use of a 28 nm design. AMD has clocked the core frequency at 933 MHz. The GDDR5 RAM works at a speed of 1250 MHz on this particular card. It features 1792 SPUs along with 112 TAUs and 32 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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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.

3DMark Fire Strike Graphics Score

Geforce GTX 690		13111 points
Radeon R9 280		7961 points
	Difference: 5150 (65%)

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon R9 280		250 Watts
Geforce GTX 690		300 Watts
	Difference: 50 Watts (20%)

Memory Bandwidth

In theory, the Geforce GTX 690 will be 60% faster than the Radeon R9 280 in general, because of its greater data rate. (explain)

Geforce GTX 690		384512 MB/sec
Radeon R9 280		240000 MB/sec
	Difference: 144512 (60%)

Texel Rate

The Geforce GTX 690 should be much (approximately 124%) better at texture filtering than the Radeon R9 280. (explain)

Geforce GTX 690		234240 Mtexels/sec
Radeon R9 280		104496 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 129744 (124%)

Pixel Rate

The Geforce GTX 690 should be much (more or less 96%) faster with regards to FSAA than the Radeon R9 280, and should be able to handle higher screen resolutions without slowing down too much. (explain)

Geforce GTX 690		58560 Mpixels/sec
Radeon R9 280		29856 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 28704 (96%)

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.

One or more cards in this comparison are multi-core. This means that their bandwidth, texel and pixel rates are theoretically doubled - this does not mean the card will actually perform twice as fast, but only that it should in theory be able to. Actual game benchmarks will give a more accurate idea of what it's capable of.

Price Comparison

Specifications

Memory Bandwidth: Bandwidth is the max amount of information (counted in MB per second) that can be transferred over the external memory interface in one second. It's worked out by multiplying the bus width by the speed of its memory. In the case of DDR memory, it should be multiplied by 2 once again. If 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 are applied in one second. This is worked out by multiplying the total amount of texture units of the card by the core clock speed of the chip. The higher the texel rate, 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 the video card can possibly record to the local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is calculated by multiplying the amount of ROPs by the the card's 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 output rate also depends on quite a few other factors, especially the memory bandwidth - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to reach the max fill rate.