Radeon R9 280 vs Radeon RX 6900 XT

Intro

Compare all that to the Radeon RX 6900 XT, which comes with clock speeds of 1825 MHz on the GPU, and 2000 MHz on the 16384 MB of GDDR6 RAM. It features 5120 SPUs along with 320 TAUs and 128 ROPs.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon R9 280		250 Watts
Radeon RX 6900 XT		300 Watts
	Difference: 50 Watts (20%)

Memory Bandwidth

The Radeon RX 6900 XT should in theory be a lot faster than the Radeon R9 280 in general. (explain)

Radeon RX 6900 XT		524288 MB/sec
Radeon R9 280		240000 MB/sec
	Difference: 284288 (118%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon RX 6900 XT will be a lot (more or less 459%) better at AF than the Radeon R9 280. (explain)

Radeon RX 6900 XT		584000 Mtexels/sec
Radeon R9 280		104496 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 479504 (459%)

Pixel Rate

If running with high levels of AA is important to you, then the Radeon RX 6900 XT is a better choice, and very much so. (explain)

Radeon RX 6900 XT		233600 Mpixels/sec
Radeon R9 280		29856 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 203744 (682%)

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 MB 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 its memory speed. If the card has DDR RAM, the result should be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The better the memory bandwidth, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, HDR and high resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum number of texture map elements (texels) that are processed in one 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 graphics card will be at texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels in a second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum number of pixels the video card could possibly write to the local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is calculated by multiplying the number of Render Output Units by the clock speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also called Render Output Units) are responsible for drawing the pixels (image) on 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 reach the max fill rate.