GeForce RTX 2060 vs Radeon R9 280X

Intro

The GeForce RTX 2060 makes use of a 12 nm design. nVidia has clocked the core frequency at 1365 MHz. The GDDR6 RAM is set to run at a frequency of 1750 MHz on this specific card. It features 1920 SPUs as well as 120 Texture Address Units and 48 Rasterization Operator Units.

Compare all of that to the Radeon R9 280X, which makes use of a 28 nm design. AMD has set the core frequency at 850 MHz. The GDDR5 memory runs at a frequency of 1500 MHz on this card. It features 2048 SPUs as well as 128 TAUs and 32 Rasterization Operator Units.

Price Comparison

Specifications

Memory Bandwidth: Memory bandwidth is the largest amount of information (counted in megabytes per second) that can be moved across the external memory interface in a second. It is worked out by multiplying the card's interface width by its memory clock speed. If it uses DDR type memory, it must be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The better the card's memory bandwidth, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, HDR and high resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum texture map elements (texels) that are applied in one second. This figure is calculated by multiplying the total number of texture units of the card 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 processed per second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels that the graphics card can possibly write to the local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is calculated by multiplying the number of 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 fill rate also depends on lots of other factors, especially the memory bandwidth - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the ability to get to the maximum fill rate.