AMD Radeon R9 280X vs NVIDIA GeForce GTX 650

Compare AMD Radeon R9 280X 3 GB vs NVIDIA GeForce GTX 650 2 GB, specs and GPU benchmark score. Which is the better graphics card for the money?

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Benchmark Score

Overall Score

General gaming and workstation score

1687 points

487% significantly better overall score

287 points

Flux Core frame rate

Volumetric ray casting test, a computationally expensive method of rendering high-quality scenes

40 FPS

33 FPS significantly higher Flux Core frame rate

7 FPS

Electron frame rate

Randomly generated noise sphere test

25 FPS

21 FPS significantly higher Electron frame rate

4 FPS

City frame rate

Procedurally generated city scene with voxel rendering

35 FPS

31 FPS significantly higher City frame rate

4 FPS

Clouds frame rate

Real-time noise calculation and ray marching test

14 FPS

11 FPS significantly higher Clouds frame rate

3 FPS

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Other Benchmarks

3DMark Graphics score

High-end graphics benchmark

2350 points

330% significantly higher 3DMark Graphics score

546 points

Specifications

Core Clock Speed

Nominal chip frequency

850 MHz

1058 MHz

24% slightly higher core clock speed

Memory

Onboard memory size for textures and vertices

3 GiB

49% significantly more memory

2 GiB

Memory Bus Width

Number of parallel lines to the memory chips

384 Bit

200% significantly larger memory bus width

128 Bit

Memory Bandwidth

Data transfer speed between GPU core and memory

288 GB/s

259% significantly higher memory bandwidth

80 GB/s

TDP

Thermal Design Power: Measure of heat generated by the GPU

250 W

64 W

290% significantly lower TDP

Pixel Rate

Number of pixels that can be rendered per second

32 Gigapixels/s

278% significantly higher pixel rate

8.46 Gigapixels/s

Texture Rate

Number of textured pixels that can be rendered per second

128 Gigatexels/s

278% significantly higher texture rate

33.86 Gigatexels/s

Shading Units

Number of processors dedicated to shader processing

2048

433% significantly more shading units

384

Texture Mapping Units

Number of processors dedicated to applying textures

128

300% significantly more texture mapping units

Render Output Processors

Number of processors dedicated to final pixel rendering

100% significantly more render output processors

Other details

Rank

Ranking in the hardwareDB database

226th of 586

383rd of 586

Family

The product line

Radeon R9 200 Series

Memory Type

The type of memory used by this chip

GDDR5

DirectX Support

Maximum version of DirectX supported

12.0

11.0

OpenGL Support

Maximum version of OpenGL supported

4.5

Radeon R9 280X vs GeForce GTX 650 benchmarks

For gaming, the Radeon R9 280X graphics card is better than the GeForce GTX 650 in our tests.

In our comparison, the GeForce GTX 650 has a slightly higher core clock speed. The core clock speed (or base speed) is the frequency at which the GPU core runs. This metric makes sense when comparing GPUs of a similar architecture or generation.

Next up, in terms of GPU memory, the Radeon R9 280X has significantly more memory with 3 GiB of memory compared to 2 GiB. Memory size doesn't directly affect performance, but too little memory will certainly degrade gaming performance.

In addition, the GeForce GTX 650 has a significantly lower TDP at 64 W when compared to the Radeon R9 280X at 250 W. Heat output doesn't match power consumption directly but, it's a good estimate.

According to the results of the hardwareDB benchmark utility, the Radeon R9 280X is faster than the GeForce GTX 650.