Radeon R9 280X vs Radeon R9 380X

Intro

Compare all of that to the Radeon R9 380X, which has a GPU core clock speed of 970 MHz, and 4096 MB of GDDR5 RAM running at 1425 MHz through a 256-bit bus. It also is comprised of 2048 Stream Processors, 128 Texture Address Units, and 32 ROPs.

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 280X		8886 points
	Difference: 633 (7%)

Ethereum Mining Hash Rate

Radeon R9 280X		21 Mh/s
Radeon R9 380X		19 Mh/s
	Difference: 2 (11%)

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

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

Memory Bandwidth

Performance-wise, the Radeon R9 280X should in theory be quite a bit superior to the Radeon R9 380X overall. (explain)

Radeon R9 280X		288000 MB/sec
Radeon R9 380X		182400 MB/sec
	Difference: 105600 (58%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon R9 380X will be a bit (about 14%) better at anisotropic filtering than the Radeon R9 280X. (explain)

Radeon R9 380X		124160 Mtexels/sec
Radeon R9 280X		108800 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 15360 (14%)

Pixel Rate

If running with a high screen resolution is important to you, then the Radeon R9 380X is a better choice, not by a very large margin though. (explain)

Radeon R9 380X		31040 Mpixels/sec
Radeon R9 280X		27200 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 3840 (14%)

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 information (measured in megabytes per second) that can be moved past the external memory interface in one second. It's worked out by multiplying the card's interface width by the speed of its memory. If the card has DDR RAM, it must be multiplied by 2 once again. If DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The better the card's memory bandwidth, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, High Dynamic Range and higher screen resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum 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 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 in one second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum number of pixels the graphics card could possibly write to the local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is worked out by multiplying the amount of colour ROPs by the the core speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - sometimes also referred to as Render Output Units) are responsible for filling the screen with pixels (the image). The actual pixel rate also depends on many other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the ability to get to the max fill rate.