Radeon HD 7850 vs Radeon R9 280X

Intro

Compare all that to the Radeon R9 280X, which has GPU clock speed of 850 MHz, and 3072 MB of GDDR5 memory running at 1500 MHz through a 384-bit bus. It also features 2048 SPUs, 128 TAUs, and 32 Raster Operation 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 7850		5200 points
	Difference: 3686 (71%)

Zcash Mining Hash Rate

Radeon R9 280X		294 Sol/s
Radeon HD 7850		171 Sol/s
	Difference: 123 (72%)

Ethereum Mining Hash Rate

Radeon R9 280X		21 Mh/s
Radeon HD 7850		13 Mh/s
	Difference: 8 (62%)

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon HD 7850		130 Watts
Radeon R9 280X		250 Watts
	Difference: 120 Watts (92%)

Memory Bandwidth

Performance-wise, the Radeon R9 280X should theoretically be much superior to the Radeon HD 7850 overall. (explain)

Radeon R9 280X		288000 MB/sec
Radeon HD 7850		153600 MB/sec
	Difference: 134400 (88%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon R9 280X is quite a bit (approximately 98%) better at anisotropic filtering than the Radeon HD 7850. (explain)

Radeon R9 280X		108800 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 7850		55040 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 53760 (98%)

Pixel Rate

If using high levels of AA is important to you, then the Radeon HD 7850 is the winner, but it probably won't make a huge difference. (explain)

Radeon HD 7850		27520 Mpixels/sec
Radeon R9 280X		27200 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 320 (1%)

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 data (in units of MB per second) that can be moved over the external memory interface in a second. It is worked out by multiplying the card's bus width by its memory speed. If it uses DDR type RAM, it must be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The better the memory bandwidth, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, High Dynamic Range and higher screen resolutions.

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

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