Radeon R9 280 vs Radeon RX 560

Intro

Compare those specs to the Radeon RX 560, which uses a 14 nm design. AMD has set the core frequency at 1175 MHz. The GDDR5 memory runs at a frequency of 1750 MHz on this model. It features 1024 SPUs along with 64 TAUs and 16 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon RX 560		80 Watts
Radeon R9 280		250 Watts
	Difference: 170 Watts (213%)

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically speaking, the Radeon R9 280 should be 109% quicker than the Radeon RX 560 in general, because of its greater bandwidth. (explain)

Radeon R9 280		240000 MB/sec
Radeon RX 560		114688 MB/sec
	Difference: 125312 (109%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon R9 280 should be a lot (more or less 39%) more effective at anisotropic filtering than the Radeon RX 560. (explain)

Radeon R9 280		104496 Mtexels/sec
Radeon RX 560		75200 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 29296 (39%)

Pixel Rate

If running with high levels of AA is important to you, then the Radeon R9 280 is superior to the Radeon RX 560, by far. (explain)

Radeon R9 280		29856 Mpixels/sec
Radeon RX 560		18800 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 11056 (59%)

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 maximum amount of data (measured in MB per second) that can be transported across the external memory interface within a second. It's worked out by multiplying the interface width by its memory clock speed. If it uses DDR RAM, it must be multiplied by 2 once again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher the bandwidth is, 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 amount of texture map elements (texels) that are processed per second. This is worked out by multiplying the total number of texture units by the core clock speed of the chip. The higher the texel rate, the better the graphics card will be at texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels processed in a second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels that the graphics card can possibly record to its local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is calculated by multiplying the number of Raster Operations Pipelines by the the core clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - sometimes also referred to as Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel fill rate is also dependant on many other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to reach the max fill rate.