Radeon HD 4790 vs Radeon R9 280

Intro

Compare those specs to the Radeon R9 280, which comes with core clock 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

Hide Graphs

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically, the Radeon R9 280 should perform quite a bit faster than the Radeon HD 4790 overall. (explain)

Radeon R9 280		240000 MB/sec
Radeon HD 4790		102400 MB/sec
	Difference: 137600 (134%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon R9 280 will be much (approximately 444%) faster with regards to anisotropic filtering than the Radeon HD 4790. (explain)

Radeon R9 280		104496 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 4790		19200 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 85296 (444%)

Pixel Rate

If using high levels of AA is important to you, then the Radeon R9 280 is superior to the Radeon HD 4790, by a large margin. (explain)

Radeon R9 280		29856 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 4790		9600 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 20256 (211%)

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 (in units of MB per second) that can be moved past the external memory interface in a second. It is worked out by multiplying the interface width by the speed of its memory. In the case of DDR RAM, it should be multiplied by 2 again. If DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The better 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 number of texture map elements (texels) that can be processed in one second. This number is calculated by multiplying the total amount of texture units of the card by the core speed of the chip. The better this number, the better the card will be at handling texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels in a second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels that the graphics card can possibly record to its local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is worked out by multiplying the amount of Render Output Units by the the core speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also sometimes called Render Output Units) are responsible for filling the screen with pixels (the image). The actual pixel fill rate also depends on many other factors, especially the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to get to the max fill rate.