Radeon R9 280 vs Radeon RX 480

Intro

Compare those specs to the Radeon RX 480, which uses a 14 nm design. AMD has clocked the core frequency at 1120 MHz. The GDDR5 memory works at a frequency of 2000 MHz on this particular card. It features 2304 SPUs as well as 144 Texture Address Units and 32 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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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 RX 480		13349 points
Radeon R9 280		7961 points
	Difference: 5388 (68%)

Zcash Mining Hash Rate

Radeon RX 480		280 Sol/s
Radeon R9 280		183 Sol/s
	Difference: 97 (53%)

Ethereum Mining Hash Rate

Radeon RX 480		27 Mh/s
Radeon R9 280		22 Mh/s
	Difference: 5 (23%)

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon RX 480		150 Watts
Radeon R9 280		250 Watts
	Difference: 100 Watts (67%)

Memory Bandwidth

Performance-wise, the Radeon RX 480 should in theory be a small bit better than the Radeon R9 280 in general. (explain)

Radeon RX 480		262144 MB/sec
Radeon R9 280		240000 MB/sec
	Difference: 22144 (9%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon RX 480 is a lot (approximately 54%) faster with regards to anisotropic filtering than the Radeon R9 280. (explain)

Radeon RX 480		161280 Mtexels/sec
Radeon R9 280		104496 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 56784 (54%)

Pixel Rate

If using a high screen resolution is important to you, then the Radeon RX 480 is a better choice, but not by far. (explain)

Radeon RX 480		35840 Mpixels/sec
Radeon R9 280		29856 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 5984 (20%)

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 maximum amount of data (in units of MB per second) that can be transferred past the external memory interface in a second. It's worked out by multiplying the interface width by its memory clock speed. If the card has DDR RAM, it should be multiplied by 2 again. If DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The higher the memory bandwidth, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, HDR and higher screen resolutions.

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

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum amount of pixels that the graphics chip 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 Raster Operations Pipelines by the clock speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - sometimes also referred to as Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel fill rate is also dependant on many other factors, especially the memory bandwidth - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the potential to reach the maximum fill rate.