Radeon HD 6870 vs Radeon R9 280

Intro

Compare all of that to the Radeon R9 280, which has a core clock frequency of 933 MHz and a GDDR5 memory frequency of 1250 MHz. It also makes use of a 384-bit bus, and uses a 28 nm design. It is made up of 1792 SPUs, 112 TAUs, and 32 Raster Operation Units.

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 6870		2870 points
	Difference: 5091 (177%)

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon HD 6870		151 Watts
Radeon R9 280		250 Watts
	Difference: 99 Watts (66%)

Memory Bandwidth

Performance-wise, the Radeon R9 280 should theoretically be much better than the Radeon HD 6870 overall. (explain)

Radeon R9 280		240000 MB/sec
Radeon HD 6870		134400 MB/sec
	Difference: 105600 (79%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon R9 280 will be much (more or less 107%) better at AF than the Radeon HD 6870. (explain)

Radeon R9 280		104496 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 6870		50400 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 54096 (107%)

Pixel Rate

If using lots of anti-aliasing is important to you, then the Radeon R9 280 is superior to the Radeon HD 6870, though not by far. (explain)

Radeon R9 280		29856 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 6870		28800 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 1056 (4%)

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 maximum amount of data (counted in MB per second) that can be transferred over the external memory interface within a second. It's worked out by multiplying the card's bus width by its memory clock speed. If the card has DDR type RAM, the result should be multiplied by 2 once again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The higher the bandwidth is, the better 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 texture map elements (texels) that are applied per second. This figure is calculated by multiplying the total number of texture units of the card 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 per second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum amount of pixels that the graphics chip could possibly record to the local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is worked out by multiplying the number of ROPs by the clock speed of the card. 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 many other factors, especially the memory bandwidth - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the ability to reach the max fill rate.