Radeon HD 7870 XT vs Radeon R9 280X

Intro

Compare that to the Radeon R9 280X, which features core clock speeds of 850 MHz on the GPU, and 1500 MHz on the 3072 MB of GDDR5 RAM. It features 2048 SPUs along with 128 Texture Address Units 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 HD 7870 XT		6390 points
	Difference: 2496 (39%)

Ethereum Mining Hash Rate

Radeon R9 280X		21 Mh/s
Radeon HD 7870 XT		15 Mh/s
	Difference: 6 (40%)

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

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

Memory Bandwidth

As far as performance goes, the Radeon R9 280X should in theory be much better than the Radeon HD 7870 XT in general. (explain)

Radeon R9 280X		288000 MB/sec
Radeon HD 7870 XT		192000 MB/sec
	Difference: 96000 (50%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon R9 280X will be much (more or less 23%) faster with regards to anisotropic filtering than the Radeon HD 7870 XT. (explain)

Radeon R9 280X		108800 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 7870 XT		88800 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 20000 (23%)

Pixel Rate

If using a high resolution is important to you, then the Radeon HD 7870 XT is a better choice, but only just. (explain)

Radeon HD 7870 XT		29600 Mpixels/sec
Radeon R9 280X		27200 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 2400 (9%)

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: Bandwidth is the largest amount of information (measured in MB per second) that can be moved past the external memory interface within a second. It is worked out by multiplying the interface width by the speed of its memory. In the case of DDR RAM, it must be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The higher the memory bandwidth, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, HDR and higher screen resolutions.

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

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels that the graphics chip could possibly write to the local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is worked out by multiplying the number of colour ROPs by the the core speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also sometimes called Render Output Units) are responsible for drawing the pixels (image) on the screen. The actual pixel output rate is also dependant on many other factors, especially the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the potential to get to the max fill rate.