GeForce GTX 980 vs Radeon R9 280

Intro

Compare those specs to the Radeon R9 280, which features GPU core speed of 933 MHz, and 3072 MB of GDDR5 memory set to run at 1250 MHz through a 384-bit bus. It also is made up of 1792 SPUs, 112 Texture Address Units, and 32 Raster Operation Units.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

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 980		13552 points
Radeon R9 280		7961 points
	Difference: 5591 (70%)

Ethereum Mining Hash Rate

Radeon R9 280		22 Mh/s
GeForce GTX 980		20 Mh/s
	Difference: 2 (10%)

Zcash Mining Hash Rate

GeForce GTX 980		408 Sol/s
Radeon R9 280		183 Sol/s
	Difference: 225 (123%)

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce GTX 980		165 Watts
Radeon R9 280		250 Watts
	Difference: 85 Watts (52%)

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically speaking, the Radeon R9 280 is 7% faster than the GeForce GTX 980 overall, due to its greater bandwidth. (explain)

Radeon R9 280		240000 MB/sec
GeForce GTX 980		224000 MB/sec
	Difference: 16000 (7%)

Texel Rate

The GeForce GTX 980 should be much (approximately 38%) faster with regards to AF than the Radeon R9 280. (explain)

GeForce GTX 980		144128 Mtexels/sec
Radeon R9 280		104496 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 39632 (38%)

Pixel Rate

If running with lots of anti-aliasing is important to you, then the GeForce GTX 980 is superior to the Radeon R9 280, by a large margin. (explain)

GeForce GTX 980		72064 Mpixels/sec
Radeon R9 280		29856 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 42208 (141%)

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 (in units of megabytes 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. If it uses DDR RAM, it must be multiplied by 2 once again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher 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 amount of texture map elements (texels) that can be applied per second. This number is worked out by multiplying the total texture units by the core speed of the chip. The higher the texel rate, the better the 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 chip could possibly write to its local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is calculated by multiplying the amount of ROPs by the clock speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also sometimes called Render Output Units) are responsible for drawing the pixels (image) on the screen. The actual pixel output rate also depends on many other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the ability to reach the maximum fill rate.