Radeon R9 280 vs Radeon R9 380X

Intro

Compare those specs to the Radeon R9 380X, which makes use of a 28 nm design. AMD has set the core frequency at 970 MHz. The GDDR5 RAM is set to run at a frequency of 1425 MHz on this particular model. It features 2048 SPUs as well as 128 TAUs and 32 Rasterization Operator Units.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

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

The Radeon R9 280, in theory, should perform quite a bit faster than the Radeon R9 380X in general. (explain)

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

Texel Rate

The Radeon R9 380X will be just a bit (approximately 19%) faster with regards to 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 running with high levels of AA is important to you, then the Radeon R9 380X is the winner, not by a very large margin though. (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 maximum amount of data (measured in megabytes per second) that can be transported past the external memory interface within a second. It's worked out by multiplying the card's bus width by its memory clock speed. If it uses DDR RAM, it should be multiplied by 2 again. If DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The better the card's memory bandwidth, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, HDR and higher screen resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum number of texture map elements (texels) that are applied in one second. This is worked out by multiplying the total amount of texture units of the card by the core clock 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 applied in a second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum amount of pixels that the graphics card can possibly write to its local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is worked out by multiplying the number of Raster Operations Pipelines by the the core clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also called Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel output rate is also dependant 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.