Radeon HD 6990 vs Radeon R9 280

Intro

Compare all that to the Radeon R9 280, which features core speeds of 933 MHz on the GPU, and 1250 MHz on the 3072 MB of GDDR5 RAM. It features 1792 SPUs along with 112 TAUs 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 6990		5820 points
	Difference: 2141 (37%)

Ethereum Mining Hash Rate

Radeon HD 6990		24 Mh/s
Radeon R9 280		22 Mh/s
	Difference: 2 (9%)

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon R9 280		250 Watts
Radeon HD 6990		375 Watts
	Difference: 125 Watts (50%)

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically speaking, the Radeon HD 6990 is 33% quicker than the Radeon R9 280 in general, due to its higher bandwidth. (explain)

Radeon HD 6990		320000 MB/sec
Radeon R9 280		240000 MB/sec
	Difference: 80000 (33%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 6990 should be much (approximately 53%) faster with regards to anisotropic filtering than the Radeon R9 280. (explain)

Radeon HD 6990		159360 Mtexels/sec
Radeon R9 280		104496 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 54864 (53%)

Pixel Rate

If running with high levels of AA is important to you, then the Radeon HD 6990 is superior to the Radeon R9 280, by a large margin. (explain)

Radeon HD 6990		53120 Mpixels/sec
Radeon R9 280		29856 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 23264 (78%)

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.

One or more cards in this comparison are multi-core. This means that their bandwidth, texel and pixel rates are theoretically doubled - this does not mean the card will actually perform twice as fast, but only that it should in theory be able to. Actual game benchmarks will give a more accurate idea of what it's capable of.

Price Comparison

Specifications

Memory Bandwidth: Bandwidth is the maximum amount of information (measured in megabytes per second) that can be transferred past the external memory interface in a second. It's worked out by multiplying the interface width by its memory clock speed. If the card has DDR memory, the result should be multiplied by 2 once again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher the bandwidth is, 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 are applied in one second. This is worked out by multiplying the total number of texture units of the card by the core clock speed of the chip. The higher the texel rate, the better the graphics card will be at handling texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels processed in a second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum amount of pixels that the graphics card could possibly write to the local memory in a 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 - also sometimes 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, especially the memory bandwidth - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the ability to get to the max fill rate.