GeForce GTX 870M vs Radeon R9 M280X

Intro

Compare all that to the Radeon R9 M280X, which features core speeds of 900 MHz on the GPU, and 1375 MHz on the 4096 MB of GDDR5 memory. It features 896 SPUs along with 56 Texture Address Units and 16 ROPs.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon R9 M280X		75 Watts
GeForce GTX 870M		110 Watts
	Difference: 35 Watts (47%)

Memory Bandwidth

In theory, the GeForce GTX 870M should perform a little bit faster than the Radeon R9 M280X overall. (explain)

GeForce GTX 870M		96000 MB/sec
Radeon R9 M280X		88000 MB/sec
	Difference: 8000 (9%)

Texel Rate

The GeForce GTX 870M should be a lot (more or less 109%) better at texture filtering than the Radeon R9 M280X. (explain)

GeForce GTX 870M		105392 Mtexels/sec
Radeon R9 M280X		50400 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 54992 (109%)

Pixel Rate

If running with lots of anti-aliasing is important to you, then the GeForce GTX 870M is a better choice, by far. (explain)

GeForce GTX 870M		22584 Mpixels/sec
Radeon R9 M280X		14400 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 8184 (57%)

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 maximum amount of information (measured in MB per second) that can be transferred over the external memory interface in a second. The number is calculated by multiplying the bus width by the speed of its memory. In the case of DDR memory, the result should be multiplied by 2 once again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher the bandwidth is, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, HDR and high resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum texture map elements (texels) that can be processed in one second. This is calculated by multiplying the total texture units of the card by the core speed of the chip. The better this number, the better the graphics card will be at texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels applied in one second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum amount of pixels the video card can possibly record to the local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is calculated by multiplying the number of Render Output Units by the the card's 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 also depends on quite a few other factors, especially the memory bandwidth - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the ability to reach the maximum fill rate.