Radeon R7 250X 2GB vs Radeon R9 280

Intro

Compare all of that to the Radeon R9 280, which comes with core speeds of 933 MHz on the GPU, and 1250 MHz on the 3072 MB of GDDR5 memory. It features 1792 SPUs as well as 112 Texture Address Units and 32 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon R7 250X 2GB		95 Watts
Radeon R9 280		250 Watts
	Difference: 155 Watts (163%)

Memory Bandwidth

The Radeon R9 280 should in theory be much faster than the Radeon R7 250X 2GB in general. (explain)

Radeon R9 280		240000 MB/sec
Radeon R7 250X 2GB		72000 MB/sec
	Difference: 168000 (233%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon R9 280 should be quite a bit (more or less 161%) faster with regards to anisotropic filtering than the Radeon R7 250X 2GB. (explain)

Radeon R9 280		104496 Mtexels/sec
Radeon R7 250X 2GB		40000 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 64496 (161%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon R9 280 will be much (more or less 87%) faster with regards to anti-aliasing than the Radeon R7 250X 2GB, and will be able to handle higher screen resolutions more effectively. (explain)

Radeon R9 280		29856 Mpixels/sec
Radeon R7 250X 2GB		16000 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 13856 (87%)

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 maximum amount of information (in units of MB per second) that can be transported across the external memory interface within a second. The number is calculated by multiplying the card's bus width by the speed of its memory. If it uses DDR memory, the result should 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 texture map elements (texels) that can be applied in one second. This figure is calculated by multiplying the total number of texture units of the card by the core speed of the chip. The higher the texel rate, the better the video card will be at texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels processed per second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum number of pixels that the graphics card could possibly write to its local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is calculated by multiplying the amount of ROPs 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 fill rate also depends on lots of other factors, especially the memory bandwidth - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the ability to reach the max fill rate.