Radeon HD 7870 XT vs Radeon R9 280

Intro

Compare those specifications to the Radeon R9 280, which features core clock speeds of 933 MHz on the GPU, and 1250 MHz on the 3072 MB of GDDR5 memory. It features 1792 SPUs along with 112 TAUs and 32 Rasterization Operator 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

Radeon R9 280		7961 points
Radeon HD 7870 XT		6390 points
	Difference: 1571 (25%)

Ethereum Mining Hash Rate

Radeon R9 280		22 Mh/s
Radeon HD 7870 XT		15 Mh/s
	Difference: 7 (47%)

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon HD 7870 XT		185 Watts
Radeon R9 280		250 Watts
	Difference: 65 Watts (35%)

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically, the Radeon R9 280 should perform a lot faster than the Radeon HD 7870 XT overall. (explain)

Radeon R9 280		240000 MB/sec
Radeon HD 7870 XT		192000 MB/sec
	Difference: 48000 (25%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon R9 280 will be a bit (more or less 18%) more effective at anisotropic filtering than the Radeon HD 7870 XT. (explain)

Radeon R9 280		104496 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 7870 XT		88800 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 15696 (18%)

Pixel Rate

If using a high resolution is important to you, then the Radeon R9 280 is superior to the Radeon HD 7870 XT, but it probably won't make a huge difference. (explain)

Radeon R9 280		29856 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 7870 XT		29600 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 256 (1%)

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: Memory bandwidth is the largest amount of data (measured in MB per second) that can be transported across the external memory interface in a second. It's worked out by multiplying the interface width by its memory speed. If the card has DDR memory, it should be multiplied by 2 once again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher the card's memory bandwidth, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, HDR and high resolutions.

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

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels the graphics card could possibly write to its local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is calculated by multiplying the number of colour ROPs by the the core clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also called Render Output Units) are responsible for filling the screen with pixels (the image). The actual pixel output rate also depends on quite a few other factors, especially the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the potential to reach the maximum fill rate.