GeForce GTX 280 vs GeForce GTX 880M

Intro

Compare those specs to the GeForce GTX 880M, which uses a 28 nm design. nVidia has clocked the core speed at 954 MHz. The GDDR5 RAM works at a speed of 1000 MHz on this specific card. It features 1536 SPUs along with 128 TAUs and 32 ROPs.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce GTX 880M		130 Watts
GeForce GTX 280		236 Watts
	Difference: 106 Watts (82%)

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically speaking, the GeForce GTX 280 should be 11% faster than the GeForce GTX 880M overall, due to its greater bandwidth. (explain)

GeForce GTX 280		141696 MB/sec
GeForce GTX 880M		128000 MB/sec
	Difference: 13696 (11%)

Texel Rate

The GeForce GTX 880M is a lot (about 154%) more effective at texture filtering than the GeForce GTX 280. (explain)

GeForce GTX 880M		122112 Mtexels/sec
GeForce GTX 280		48160 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 73952 (154%)

Pixel Rate

If using a high screen resolution is important to you, then the GeForce GTX 880M is a better choice, by a large margin. (explain)

GeForce GTX 880M		30528 Mpixels/sec
GeForce GTX 280		19264 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 11264 (58%)

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 largest amount of information (measured in MB per second) that can be moved past the external memory interface in a second. It is calculated by multiplying the bus width by the speed of its memory. If it uses DDR type RAM, it must be multiplied by 2 once again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher the memory bandwidth, the better 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 number of texture map elements (texels) that are applied in one second. This is worked out by multiplying the total texture units by the core clock speed of the chip. The better this number, the better the card will be at handling texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels applied per second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels the graphics card could possibly record to its local memory per 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 - aka Render Output Units) are responsible for drawing the pixels (image) on the screen. The actual pixel fill rate also depends on many other factors, especially the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the ability to get to the maximum fill rate.