Radeon R9 280X vs Radeon RX 5700 XT 50th Anniversary Edition

Intro

Compare those specifications to the Radeon RX 5700 XT 50th Anniversary Edition, which features core speeds of 1680 MHz on the GPU, and 1750 MHz on the 8096 MB of GDDR6 memory. It features 2560 SPUs as well as 160 TAUs and 64 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon RX 5700 XT 50th Anniversary Edition		235 Watts
Radeon R9 280X		250 Watts
	Difference: 15 Watts (6%)

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically, the Radeon RX 5700 XT 50th Anniversary Edition should perform a lot faster than the Radeon R9 280X overall. (explain)

Radeon RX 5700 XT 50th Anniversary Edition		458752 MB/sec
Radeon R9 280X		288000 MB/sec
	Difference: 170752 (59%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon RX 5700 XT 50th Anniversary Edition is much (more or less 147%) more effective at AF than the Radeon R9 280X. (explain)

Radeon RX 5700 XT 50th Anniversary Edition		268800 Mtexels/sec
Radeon R9 280X		108800 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 160000 (147%)

Pixel Rate

If running with lots of anti-aliasing is important to you, then the Radeon RX 5700 XT 50th Anniversary Edition is a better choice, by far. (explain)

Radeon RX 5700 XT 50th Anniversary Edition		107520 Mpixels/sec
Radeon R9 280X		27200 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 80320 (295%)

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 (in units of megabytes per second) that can be transferred across the external memory interface within a second. It is calculated by multiplying the card's bus width by its memory speed. If it uses DDR memory, the result should be multiplied by 2 again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The better the card's memory bandwidth, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, HDR and high resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum texture map elements (texels) that can be applied per second. This figure is calculated by multiplying the total texture units by the core clock speed of the chip. The better this number, the better the graphics card will be at texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels applied per second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels that the graphics card could possibly write to its local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is worked out by multiplying the amount of colour ROPs by the clock speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also called Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel rate also depends on quite a few other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the ability to get to the maximum fill rate.