Radeon R9 280 vs Radeon R9 380X

Intro

Compare those specifications to the Radeon R9 380X, which uses a 28 nm design. AMD has clocked the core frequency at 970 MHz. The GDDR5 RAM works at a speed of 1425 MHz on this particular model. It features 2048 SPUs as well as 128 Texture Address Units and 32 Rasterization Operator 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 380X		9519 points
Radeon R9 280		7961 points
	Difference: 1558 (20%)

Ethereum Mining Hash Rate

Radeon R9 280		22 Mh/s
Radeon R9 380X		19 Mh/s
	Difference: 3 (16%)

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon R9 380X		190 Watts
Radeon R9 280		250 Watts
	Difference: 60 Watts (32%)

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically speaking, the Radeon R9 280 will be 32% faster than the Radeon R9 380X in general, due to its higher bandwidth. (explain)

Radeon R9 280		240000 MB/sec
Radeon R9 380X		182400 MB/sec
	Difference: 57600 (32%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon R9 380X should be a bit (about 19%) better at anisotropic filtering than the Radeon R9 280. (explain)

Radeon R9 380X		124160 Mtexels/sec
Radeon R9 280		104496 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 19664 (19%)

Pixel Rate

If using a high resolution is important to you, then the Radeon R9 380X is a better choice, but only just. (explain)

Radeon R9 380X		31040 Mpixels/sec
Radeon R9 280		29856 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 1184 (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 largest amount of data (in units of megabytes per second) that can be transported over the external memory interface in a second. It's calculated by multiplying the card's bus width by the speed of its memory. In the case of DDR type memory, it should be multiplied by 2 once again. If DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The higher the memory bandwidth, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, HDR and high resolutions.

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

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels that the graphics card could possibly record to its local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is calculated by multiplying the number of colour 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 fill rate also depends on lots of 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.