Radeon HD 3870 X2 512MB vs Radeon R9 280

Intro

Compare those specifications to the Radeon R9 280, which has a GPU core clock speed of 933 MHz, and 3072 MB of GDDR5 memory running at 1250 MHz through a 384-bit bus. It also is comprised of 1792 Stream Processors, 112 Texture Address Units, and 32 Raster Operation Units.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Memory Bandwidth

Performance-wise, the Radeon R9 280 should in theory be a lot superior to the Radeon HD 3870 X2 512MB in general. (explain)

Radeon R9 280		240000 MB/sec
Radeon HD 3870 X2 512MB		115200 MB/sec
	Difference: 124800 (108%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon R9 280 will be quite a bit (approximately 296%) better at anisotropic filtering than the Radeon HD 3870 X2 512MB. (explain)

Radeon R9 280		104496 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 3870 X2 512MB		26400 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 78096 (296%)

Pixel Rate

If using a high resolution is important to you, then the Radeon R9 280 is the winner, but it probably won't make a huge difference. (explain)

Radeon R9 280		29856 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 3870 X2 512MB		26400 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 3456 (13%)

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 max amount of information (measured in MB per second) that can be moved past the external memory interface in a second. The number is calculated by multiplying the interface width by the speed of its memory. In the case of DDR type memory, it must be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The better the bandwidth is, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, HDR and higher screen resolutions.

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

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum number of pixels the graphics card could possibly record to its 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 - also called Render Output Units) are responsible for drawing the pixels (image) on the screen. The actual pixel output rate also depends on quite a few other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to reach the maximum fill rate.