Radeon R9 280X vs Radeon RX 6800 XT

Intro

Compare those specs to the Radeon RX 6800 XT, which has a clock speed of 1825 MHz and a GDDR6 memory frequency of 2000 MHz. It also makes use of a 256-bit bus, and makes use of a 7 nm design. It is made up of 4608 SPUs, 288 Texture Address Units, and 128 ROPs.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon R9 280X		250 Watts
Radeon RX 6800 XT		300 Watts
	Difference: 50 Watts (20%)

Memory Bandwidth

In theory, the Radeon RX 6800 XT should perform quite a bit faster than the Radeon R9 280X overall. (explain)

Radeon RX 6800 XT		524288 MB/sec
Radeon R9 280X		288000 MB/sec
	Difference: 236288 (82%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon RX 6800 XT should be much (approximately 383%) faster with regards to texture filtering than the Radeon R9 280X. (explain)

Radeon RX 6800 XT		525600 Mtexels/sec
Radeon R9 280X		108800 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 416800 (383%)

Pixel Rate

If running with a high screen resolution is important to you, then the Radeon RX 6800 XT is the winner, by far. (explain)

Radeon RX 6800 XT		233600 Mpixels/sec
Radeon R9 280X		27200 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 206400 (759%)

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 largest amount of information (counted in megabytes per second) that can be moved across the external memory interface in a second. The number is calculated by multiplying the bus width by its memory speed. In the case of DDR RAM, it should be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The better the card's memory bandwidth, 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 can be processed in one second. This number is calculated by multiplying the total number of 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 can possibly record to its local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is worked out by multiplying the number of colour ROPs by the clock speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also sometimes called Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel fill rate also depends on lots of other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the ability to get to the max fill rate.