In terms of overall gaming performance, the graphical capabilities of the AMD FirePro S9150 are massively better than the Nvidia GeForce GTX 280.

The FirePro S9150 has a 298 MHz higher core clock speed and 96 more Texture Mapping Units than the GeForce GTX 280. This results in the FirePro S9150 providing 110.2 GTexel/s better texturing performance. This still holds weight but shader performance is generally more relevant, particularly since both of these GPUs support at least DirectX 10.

The FirePro S9150 has a 298 MHz higher core clock speed and 32 more Render Output Units than the GeForce GTX 280. This results in the FirePro S9150 providing 38.3 GPixel/s better pixeling performance. However, both GPUs support DirectX 9 or above, and pixeling performance is only really relevant when comparing older cards.

The FirePro S9150 was released over three years more recently than the GeForce GTX 280, and so the FirePro S9150 is likely to have far better driver support, meaning it will be much more optimized and ultimately superior to the GeForce GTX 280 when running the latest games.

The FirePro S9150 has 15360 MB more video memory than the GeForce GTX 280, so is likely to be much better at displaying game textures at higher resolutions. This is supported by the fact that the FirePro S9150 also has superior memory performance overall.

The FirePro S9150 has 178.3 GB/sec greater memory bandwidth than the GeForce GTX 280, which means that the memory performance of the FirePro S9150 is massively better than the GeForce GTX 280.

The FirePro S9150 has 2816 Shader Processing Units and the GeForce GTX 280 has 240. However, the actual shader performance of the FirePro S9150 is 2534 and the actual shader performance of the GeForce GTX 280 is 332. The FirePro S9150 having 2202 better shader performance and an altogether better performance when taking into account other relevant data means that the FirePro S9150 delivers a massively smoother and more efficient experience when processing graphical data than the GeForce GTX 280.

The FirePro S9150 transistor size technology is 37 nm (nanometers) smaller than the GeForce GTX 280. This means that the FirePro S9150 is expected to run much cooler and achieve higher clock frequencies than the GeForce GTX 280.

The FirePro S9150 requires 235 Watts to run and the GeForce GTX 280 requires 236 Watts. We would recommend a PSU with at least 550 Watts for the GeForce GTX 280, but we do not have a recommended PSU wattage for the FirePro S9150. The GeForce GTX 280 requires 1 Watts more than the FirePro S9150 to run. The difference is not significant enough for the GeForce GTX 280 to have a noticeably larger impact on your yearly electricity bills than the FirePro S9150.