Radeon R9 280 vs Radeon R9 290X

Intro

Compare those specifications to the Radeon R9 290X, which comes with GPU core speed of 800 MHz, and 4096 MB of GDDR5 RAM running at 1250 MHz through a 512-bit bus. It also is made up of 2816 Stream Processors, 176 TAUs, and 64 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 290X		10609 points
Radeon R9 280		7961 points
	Difference: 2648 (33%)

Zcash Mining Hash Rate

Radeon R9 290X		369 Sol/s
Radeon R9 280		183 Sol/s
	Difference: 186 (102%)

Ethereum Mining Hash Rate

Radeon R9 290X		29 Mh/s
Radeon R9 280		22 Mh/s
	Difference: 7 (32%)

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon R9 280		250 Watts
Radeon R9 290X		300 Watts
	Difference: 50 Watts (20%)

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically speaking, the Radeon R9 290X is 33% quicker than the Radeon R9 280 in general, due to its greater bandwidth. (explain)

Radeon R9 290X		320000 MB/sec
Radeon R9 280		240000 MB/sec
	Difference: 80000 (33%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon R9 290X will be quite a bit (about 35%) better at anisotropic filtering than the Radeon R9 280. (explain)

Radeon R9 290X		140800 Mtexels/sec
Radeon R9 280		104496 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 36304 (35%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon R9 290X is much (approximately 71%) faster with regards to anti-aliasing than the Radeon R9 280, and able to handle higher resolutions more effectively. (explain)

Radeon R9 290X		51200 Mpixels/sec
Radeon R9 280		29856 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 21344 (71%)

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 transferred across the external memory interface in a second. The number is worked out by multiplying the bus width by its memory clock speed. If it uses DDR RAM, it must be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The higher the bandwidth is, the faster 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 can be applied per second. This is worked out by multiplying the total texture units of the card by the core speed of the chip. The better this number, the better the card will be at handling texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels in a second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum number 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 calculated by multiplying the amount of colour ROPs by the the core speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also called Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel fill rate also depends on many other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the potential to reach the max fill rate.