Radeon HD 7850 vs Radeon R9 280X

Intro

Compare those specs to the Radeon R9 280X, which makes use of a 28 nm design. AMD has set the core speed at 850 MHz. The GDDR5 RAM is set to run at a frequency of 1500 MHz on this particular card. 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 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 in theory be a lot 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

The Radeon HD 7850 is a little bit (about 1%) more effective at anti-aliasing than the Radeon R9 280X, and should be capable of handling higher resolutions without slowing down too much. (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: Memory bandwidth is the max amount of information (in units of MB per second) that can be moved past the external memory interface within a second. The number is worked out by multiplying the card's interface width by its memory speed. If the card has DDR memory, it must be multiplied by 2 again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The better 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 number of texture map elements (texels) that are applied per second. This number is calculated by multiplying the total number of texture units by the core clock speed of the chip. The higher this number, the better the video 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 most pixels that the graphics card could possibly record to the local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is calculated by multiplying the amount of Render Output Units by the the core clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - sometimes also referred to as Render Output Units) are responsible for drawing the pixels (image) on the screen. The actual pixel fill rate also depends on lots of other factors, especially the memory bandwidth - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to reach the maximum fill rate.