Radeon R9 270 vs Radeon R9 280X

Intro

Compare all that to the Radeon R9 280X, which comes with clock speeds of 850 MHz on the GPU, and 1500 MHz on the 3072 MB of GDDR5 RAM. It features 2048 SPUs as well as 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 R9 270		5943 points
	Difference: 2943 (50%)

Ethereum Mining Hash Rate

Radeon R9 280X		21 Mh/s
Radeon R9 270		15 Mh/s
	Difference: 6 (40%)

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon R9 270		150 Watts
Radeon R9 280X		250 Watts
	Difference: 100 Watts (67%)

Memory Bandwidth

The Radeon R9 280X should in theory perform much faster than the Radeon R9 270 overall. (explain)

Radeon R9 280X		288000 MB/sec
Radeon R9 270		179200 MB/sec
	Difference: 108800 (61%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon R9 280X should be quite a bit (approximately 51%) faster with regards to AF than the Radeon R9 270. (explain)

Radeon R9 280X		108800 Mtexels/sec
Radeon R9 270		72000 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 36800 (51%)

Pixel Rate

If using lots of anti-aliasing is important to you, then the Radeon R9 270 is superior to the Radeon R9 280X, though only just barely. (explain)

Radeon R9 270		28800 Mpixels/sec
Radeon R9 280X		27200 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 1600 (6%)

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 information (in units of megabytes per second) that can be transported past the external memory interface in a second. It's worked out by multiplying the card's bus width by its memory clock speed. If the card has DDR type memory, it should be multiplied by 2 again. If DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. 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 texture map elements (texels) that are applied in one second. This number is calculated by multiplying the total texture units of the card by the core speed of the chip. The better the texel rate, the better the graphics card will be at texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels in one second.

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