Radeon HD 6970 vs Radeon R9 280

Intro

Compare those specs to the Radeon R9 280, which comes with GPU clock speed of 933 MHz, and 3072 MB of GDDR5 RAM running at 1250 MHz through a 384-bit bus. It also 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 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 in theory be quite a bit 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 much (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 high levels of AA is important to you, then the Radeon R9 280 is the winner, not by a very large margin though. (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 maximum amount of data (measured in MB per second) that can be transported over the external memory interface in one second. It's calculated by multiplying the bus width by its memory speed. If the card has DDR RAM, it should be multiplied by 2 once again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The better the bandwidth is, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, High Dynamic Range and higher screen resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum number of texture map elements (texels) that can be processed per second. This number is calculated by multiplying the total texture units by the core clock speed of the chip. The better this number, the better the card will be at texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels applied per second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum amount of pixels the graphics card could possibly write to its local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is calculated by multiplying the number of ROPs by the the core 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 is also dependant on many other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the ability to get to the maximum fill rate.