Radeon HD 7870 vs Radeon R9 280

Intro

Compare that to the Radeon R9 280, which features a core clock speed of 933 MHz and a GDDR5 memory speed of 1250 MHz. It also features a 384-bit memory bus, and uses a 28 nm design. It features 1792 SPUs, 112 Texture Address Units, and 32 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 280		7961 points
Radeon HD 7870		6230 points
	Difference: 1731 (28%)

Zcash Mining Hash Rate

Radeon R9 280		183 Sol/s
Radeon HD 7870		172 Sol/s
	Difference: 11 (6%)

Ethereum Mining Hash Rate

Radeon R9 280		22 Mh/s
Radeon HD 7870		16 Mh/s
	Difference: 6 (38%)

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon HD 7870		175 Watts
Radeon R9 280		250 Watts
	Difference: 75 Watts (43%)

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically speaking, the Radeon R9 280 should be 56% quicker than the Radeon HD 7870 overall, due to its higher bandwidth. (explain)

Radeon R9 280		240000 MB/sec
Radeon HD 7870		153600 MB/sec
	Difference: 86400 (56%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon R9 280 is much (about 31%) more effective at texture filtering than the Radeon HD 7870. (explain)

Radeon R9 280		104496 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 7870		80000 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 24496 (31%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon HD 7870 will be a bit (about 7%) faster with regards to FSAA than the Radeon R9 280, and also will be capable of handling higher screen resolutions without losing too much performance. (explain)

Radeon HD 7870		32000 Mpixels/sec
Radeon R9 280		29856 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 2144 (7%)

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

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels the graphics card can possibly record to the local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is worked out by multiplying the number of colour ROPs 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 output rate is also dependant on many other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the ability to reach the maximum fill rate.