Radeon HD 7870 vs Radeon R9 280X

Intro

Compare those specifications to the Radeon R9 280X, which has a core clock speed of 850 MHz and a GDDR5 memory speed of 1500 MHz. It also makes use of a 384-bit bus, and uses a 28 nm design. It is comprised of 2048 SPUs, 128 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 R9 280X		8886 points
Radeon HD 7870		6230 points
	Difference: 2656 (43%)

Zcash Mining Hash Rate

Radeon R9 280X		294 Sol/s
Radeon HD 7870		172 Sol/s
	Difference: 122 (71%)

Ethereum Mining Hash Rate

Radeon R9 280X		21 Mh/s
Radeon HD 7870		16 Mh/s
	Difference: 5 (31%)

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon HD 7870		175 Watts
Radeon R9 280X		250 Watts
	Difference: 75 Watts (43%)

Memory Bandwidth

The Radeon R9 280X should theoretically be much faster than the Radeon HD 7870 overall. (explain)

Radeon R9 280X		288000 MB/sec
Radeon HD 7870		153600 MB/sec
	Difference: 134400 (88%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon R9 280X is much (approximately 36%) more effective at anisotropic filtering than the Radeon HD 7870. (explain)

Radeon R9 280X		108800 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 7870		80000 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 28800 (36%)

Pixel Rate

If running with lots of anti-aliasing is important to you, then the Radeon HD 7870 is superior to the Radeon R9 280X, but not by far. (explain)

Radeon HD 7870		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 max amount of data (measured in megabytes per second) that can be transported across the external memory interface within a second. It's worked out by multiplying the card's interface width by its memory clock speed. If it uses DDR RAM, it must be multiplied by 2 once again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher the memory bandwidth, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, High Dynamic Range 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 figure is worked out by multiplying the total texture units by the core clock speed of the chip. The better this number, the better the graphics card will be at handling texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels applied per 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. Pixel rate is calculated by multiplying the number of Raster Operations Pipelines by the the card's clock speed. 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, especially the memory bandwidth - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the ability to reach the maximum fill rate.