Radeon R9 270 vs Radeon R9 285

Intro

Compare those specifications to the Radeon R9 285, which makes use of a 28 nm design. AMD has clocked the core frequency at 918 MHz. The GDDR5 RAM is set to run at a speed of 1375 MHz on this particular model. It features 1792 SPUs as well as 112 Texture Address Units and 32 ROPs.

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 285		8500 points
Radeon R9 270		5943 points
	Difference: 2557 (43%)

Ethereum Mining Hash Rate

Radeon R9 285		18 Mh/s
Radeon R9 270		15 Mh/s
	Difference: 3 (20%)

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon R9 270		150 Watts
Radeon R9 285		190 Watts
	Difference: 40 Watts (27%)

Memory Bandwidth

In theory, the Radeon R9 270 should be 2% faster than the Radeon R9 285 overall, due to its greater data rate. (explain)

Radeon R9 270		179200 MB/sec
Radeon R9 285		176000 MB/sec
	Difference: 3200 (2%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon R9 285 should be quite a bit (approximately 43%) faster with regards to AF than the Radeon R9 270. (explain)

Radeon R9 285		102816 Mtexels/sec
Radeon R9 270		72000 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 30816 (43%)

Pixel Rate

If using a high resolution is important to you, then the Radeon R9 285 is superior to the Radeon R9 270, but it probably won't make a huge difference. (explain)

Radeon R9 285		29376 Mpixels/sec
Radeon R9 270		28800 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 576 (2%)

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 max amount of data (in units of MB per second) that can be transferred past the external memory interface within a second. It's calculated by multiplying the card's interface width by the speed of its memory. If it uses DDR RAM, it should be multiplied by 2 once again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The better the bandwidth is, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, HDR and higher screen resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum amount of texture map elements (texels) that can be processed in one second. This number is worked out by multiplying the total texture units by the core speed of the chip. The better the texel rate, the better the 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 the graphics card could possibly write to its local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is calculated by multiplying the number of Raster Operations Pipelines by the clock speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also sometimes called Render Output Units) are responsible for drawing the pixels (image) on the screen. The actual pixel output 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 reach the maximum fill rate.