Radeon HD 7790 vs Radeon R9 280X

Intro

Compare all that to the Radeon R9 280X, which has core speeds of 850 MHz on the GPU, and 1500 MHz on the 3072 MB of GDDR5 memory. It features 2048 SPUs along with 128 Texture Address Units 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 7790		4330 points
	Difference: 4556 (105%)

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon HD 7790		85 Watts
Radeon R9 280X		250 Watts
	Difference: 165 Watts (194%)

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically speaking, the Radeon R9 280X will be 200% faster than the Radeon HD 7790 in general, due to its greater bandwidth. (explain)

Radeon R9 280X		288000 MB/sec
Radeon HD 7790		96000 MB/sec
	Difference: 192000 (200%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon R9 280X will be quite a bit (approximately 94%) more effective at anisotropic filtering than the Radeon HD 7790. (explain)

Radeon R9 280X		108800 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 7790		56000 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 52800 (94%)

Pixel Rate

If running with high levels of AA is important to you, then the Radeon R9 280X is a better choice, and very much so. (explain)

Radeon R9 280X		27200 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 7790		16000 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 11200 (70%)

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 max amount of information (in units of megabytes per second) that can be transported past the external memory interface in one second. It's worked out by multiplying the card's interface width by its memory clock speed. If it uses DDR RAM, the result should be multiplied by 2 once again. If DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The better the memory bandwidth, the better 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 number is worked out by multiplying the total number of texture units of the card by the core clock speed of the chip. The better this number, the better the graphics card will be at texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels applied in a second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum number of pixels the video card can possibly write to its local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is calculated by multiplying the amount of ROPs by the the core speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also called Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel rate is also dependant on many other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the ability to get to the max fill rate.