Radeon HD 7870 XT vs Radeon R9 280X

Intro

Compare that to the Radeon R9 280X, which comes with 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 TAUs and 32 ROPs.

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

The Radeon R9 280X should theoretically be much faster than the Radeon HD 7870 XT overall. (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 quite a bit (approximately 23%) more effective at AF 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

The Radeon HD 7870 XT will be a little bit (more or less 9%) better at anti-aliasing than the Radeon R9 280X, and also will be capable of handling higher screen resolutions while still performing well. (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: Memory bandwidth is the maximum amount of information (counted in megabytes per second) that can be moved past the external memory interface within a second. It's worked out by multiplying the card's bus width by the speed of its memory. If it uses DDR memory, the result should be multiplied by 2 once again. If DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The higher the bandwidth is, 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 amount of texture map elements (texels) that can be processed in one second. This figure is worked out by multiplying the total amount of texture units of the card by the core speed of the chip. The better this number, the better the video 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 can possibly write to the local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is worked out by multiplying the number of ROPs by the clock speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also sometimes called Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel rate also depends on lots of other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the ability to reach the maximum fill rate.