Radeon R7 240 vs Radeon R9 280

Intro

Compare all that to the Radeon R9 280, which makes use of a 28 nm design. AMD has set the core frequency at 933 MHz. The GDDR5 memory is set to run at a speed of 1250 MHz on this specific model. It features 1792 SPUs along with 112 Texture Address Units and 32 Rasterization Operator 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 280		7961 points
Radeon R7 240		1218 points
	Difference: 6743 (554%)

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon R7 240		30 Watts
Radeon R9 280		250 Watts
	Difference: 220 Watts (733%)

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically, the Radeon R9 280 should perform a lot faster than the Radeon R7 240 overall. (explain)

Radeon R9 280		240000 MB/sec
Radeon R7 240		28800 MB/sec
	Difference: 211200 (733%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon R9 280 is a lot (approximately 616%) faster with regards to anisotropic filtering than the Radeon R7 240. (explain)

Radeon R9 280		104496 Mtexels/sec
Radeon R7 240		14600 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 89896 (616%)

Pixel Rate

If using a high screen resolution is important to you, then the Radeon R9 280 is a better choice, and very much so. (explain)

Radeon R9 280		29856 Mpixels/sec
Radeon R7 240		5840 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 24016 (411%)

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 max amount of data (in units of MB per second) that can be moved across the external memory interface in a second. It's calculated by multiplying the interface width by the speed of its memory. If the card has DDR type memory, the result should be multiplied by 2 once again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The better the memory bandwidth, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, HDR and high resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum texture map elements (texels) that can be processed per second. This figure is worked out 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 card will be at handling texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels per second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum number of pixels the video card could possibly record to its local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is worked out by multiplying the number of Raster Operations Pipelines by the the card's clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - sometimes also referred to as Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel rate also depends on quite a few other factors, especially the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to get to the max fill rate.