Radeon R9 280X vs Radeon R9 285

Intro

Compare all that to the Radeon R9 285, which has clock speeds of 918 MHz on the GPU, and 1375 MHz on the 2048 MB of GDDR5 memory. It features 1792 SPUs along with 112 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 280X		8886 points
Radeon R9 285		8500 points
	Difference: 386 (5%)

Ethereum Mining Hash Rate

Radeon R9 280X		21 Mh/s
Radeon R9 285		18 Mh/s
	Difference: 3 (17%)

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon R9 285		190 Watts
Radeon R9 280X		250 Watts
	Difference: 60 Watts (32%)

Memory Bandwidth

Performance-wise, the Radeon R9 280X should theoretically be quite a bit superior to the Radeon R9 285 overall. (explain)

Radeon R9 280X		288000 MB/sec
Radeon R9 285		176000 MB/sec
	Difference: 112000 (64%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon R9 280X will be a small bit (about 6%) more effective at anisotropic filtering than the Radeon R9 285. (explain)

Radeon R9 280X		108800 Mtexels/sec
Radeon R9 285		102816 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 5984 (6%)

Pixel Rate

If using lots of anti-aliasing is important to you, then the Radeon R9 285 is superior to the Radeon R9 280X, but not by far. (explain)

Radeon R9 285		29376 Mpixels/sec
Radeon R9 280X		27200 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 2176 (8%)

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 (counted in megabytes per second) that can be transferred across the external memory interface within a second. The number is calculated by multiplying the card's bus width by the speed of its memory. If it uses DDR memory, it must be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The higher the bandwidth is, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, High Dynamic Range and high resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum texture map elements (texels) that can be processed per second. This is worked out by multiplying the total number of texture units by the core clock 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 processed per second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels that the graphics chip could possibly record to its local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is calculated by multiplying the amount of Raster Operations Pipelines by the clock speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also called Render Output Units) are responsible for filling the screen with pixels (the image). The actual pixel rate also depends on quite a few other factors, especially the memory bandwidth - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the potential to reach the max fill rate.