Radeon HD 7870 vs Radeon R9 280X

Intro

Compare that to the Radeon R9 280X, which comes with core speeds of 850 MHz on the GPU, and 1500 MHz on the 3072 MB of GDDR5 memory. It features 2048 SPUs as well as 128 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 R9 280X		8886 points
Radeon HD 7870		6230 points
	Difference: 2656 (43%)

Zcash Mining Hash Rate

Radeon R9 280X		294 Sol/s
Radeon HD 7870		172 Sol/s
	Difference: 122 (71%)

Ethereum Mining Hash Rate

Radeon R9 280X		21 Mh/s
Radeon HD 7870		16 Mh/s
	Difference: 5 (31%)

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon HD 7870		175 Watts
Radeon R9 280X		250 Watts
	Difference: 75 Watts (43%)

Memory Bandwidth

In theory, the Radeon R9 280X will be 88% quicker than the Radeon HD 7870 overall, because of its higher data rate. (explain)

Radeon R9 280X		288000 MB/sec
Radeon HD 7870		153600 MB/sec
	Difference: 134400 (88%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon R9 280X should be a lot (more or less 36%) better at texture filtering than the Radeon HD 7870. (explain)

Radeon R9 280X		108800 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 7870		80000 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 28800 (36%)

Pixel Rate

If running with a high resolution is important to you, then the Radeon HD 7870 is a better choice, not by a very large margin though. (explain)

Radeon HD 7870		32000 Mpixels/sec
Radeon R9 280X		27200 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 4800 (18%)

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 data (in units of megabytes per second) that can be transferred across the external memory interface in one second. It is worked out by multiplying the bus width by the speed of its memory. If it uses DDR type RAM, it must 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 AA, High Dynamic Range and higher screen resolutions.

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

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels that the graphics card could possibly write to the local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is worked out by multiplying the number of ROPs by the the core clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - sometimes also referred to as Render Output Units) are responsible for filling the screen with pixels (the image). The actual pixel output rate is also dependant on lots of other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the potential to get to the max fill rate.