Radeon R9 270X vs Radeon R9 280X

Intro

Compare those specs to the Radeon R9 280X, which uses a 28 nm design. AMD has clocked the core frequency at 850 MHz. The GDDR5 RAM works at a speed of 1500 MHz on this card. It features 2048 SPUs along with 128 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 280X		8886 points
Radeon R9 270X		6590 points
	Difference: 2296 (35%)

Zcash Mining Hash Rate

Radeon R9 280X		294 Sol/s
Radeon R9 270X		177 Sol/s
	Difference: 117 (66%)

Ethereum Mining Hash Rate

Radeon R9 280X		21 Mh/s
Radeon R9 270X		18 Mh/s
	Difference: 3 (17%)

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon R9 270X		180 Watts
Radeon R9 280X		250 Watts
	Difference: 70 Watts (39%)

Memory Bandwidth

As far as performance goes, the Radeon R9 280X should theoretically be a lot superior to the Radeon R9 270X in general. (explain)

Radeon R9 280X		288000 MB/sec
Radeon R9 270X		179200 MB/sec
	Difference: 108800 (61%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon R9 280X will be a lot (approximately 36%) better at anisotropic filtering than the Radeon R9 270X. (explain)

Radeon R9 280X		108800 Mtexels/sec
Radeon R9 270X		80000 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 28800 (36%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon R9 270X is just a bit (about 18%) more effective at FSAA than the Radeon R9 280X, and also will be capable of handling higher screen resolutions better. (explain)

Radeon R9 270X		32000 Mpixels/sec
Radeon R9 280X		27200 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 4800 (18%)

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 information (in units of MB per second) that can be transported over the external memory interface in a second. It's calculated by multiplying the bus width by its memory speed. If the card has DDR RAM, the result should be multiplied by 2 again. If 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 are applied in one second. This number is worked out by multiplying the total amount of texture units by the core speed of the chip. The higher this number, the better the card will be at handling texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels processed per second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels that the graphics chip could possibly record to the local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is worked out by multiplying the number of ROPs by the the core clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - aka Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel output rate is also dependant on quite a few other factors, especially the memory bandwidth - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to reach the maximum fill rate.