Radeon R9 280X vs Radeon RX 480

Intro

Compare all that to the Radeon RX 480, which has core speeds of 1120 MHz on the GPU, and 2000 MHz on the 8192 MB of GDDR5 RAM. It features 2304 SPUs as well as 144 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 RX 480		13349 points
Radeon R9 280X		8886 points
	Difference: 4463 (50%)

Zcash Mining Hash Rate

Radeon R9 280X		294 Sol/s
Radeon RX 480		280 Sol/s
	Difference: 14 (5%)

Ethereum Mining Hash Rate

Radeon RX 480		27 Mh/s
Radeon R9 280X		21 Mh/s
	Difference: 6 (29%)

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon RX 480		150 Watts
Radeon R9 280X		250 Watts
	Difference: 100 Watts (67%)

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically, the Radeon R9 280X should perform just a bit faster than the Radeon RX 480 overall. (explain)

Radeon R9 280X		288000 MB/sec
Radeon RX 480		262144 MB/sec
	Difference: 25856 (10%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon RX 480 is a lot (approximately 48%) faster with regards to anisotropic filtering than the Radeon R9 280X. (explain)

Radeon RX 480		161280 Mtexels/sec
Radeon R9 280X		108800 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 52480 (48%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon RX 480 will be quite a bit (more or less 32%) more effective at FSAA than the Radeon R9 280X, and also will be capable of handling higher screen resolutions without slowing down too much. (explain)

Radeon RX 480		35840 Mpixels/sec
Radeon R9 280X		27200 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 8640 (32%)

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 information (measured in MB per second) that can be moved over the external memory interface in one second. It's worked out by multiplying the card's interface width by its memory clock speed. If the card has DDR memory, it should be multiplied by 2 again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher the bandwidth is, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, High Dynamic Range and high resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum number of texture map elements (texels) that are applied per second. This number is worked out by multiplying the total texture units of the card by the core clock speed of the chip. The higher this number, the better the video card will be at texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels processed per 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 colour ROPs by the the card's clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - aka Render Output Units) are responsible for filling the screen with pixels (the image). The actual pixel output 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 ability to reach the maximum fill rate.