Radeon HD 6970 vs Radeon R9 280

Intro

Compare all that to the Radeon R9 280, which makes use of a 28 nm design. AMD has clocked the core speed at 933 MHz. The GDDR5 RAM runs at a speed of 1250 MHz on this specific card. 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 HD 6970		3470 points
	Difference: 4491 (129%)

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Both cards have the same power consumption.

Memory Bandwidth

The Radeon R9 280 should theoretically perform much faster than the Radeon HD 6970 overall. (explain)

Radeon R9 280		240000 MB/sec
Radeon HD 6970		176000 MB/sec
	Difference: 64000 (36%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon R9 280 should be a lot (about 24%) more effective at texture filtering than the Radeon HD 6970. (explain)

Radeon R9 280		104496 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 6970		84480 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 20016 (24%)

Pixel Rate

If using a high resolution is important to you, then the Radeon R9 280 is the winner, but not by far. (explain)

Radeon R9 280		29856 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 6970		28160 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 1696 (6%)

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: Memory bandwidth is the max amount of information (measured in MB per second) that can be transferred past the external memory interface within a second. The number is calculated by multiplying the bus width by the speed of its memory. If the card has DDR memory, the result should be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. 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 amount of texture map elements (texels) that are processed per second. This figure is calculated by multiplying the total texture units of the card 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 processed per second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum amount 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 core speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - sometimes also referred to as Render Output Units) are responsible for drawing the pixels (image) on the screen. The actual pixel rate is also dependant on many other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the ability to get to the maximum fill rate.