Radeon HD 7850 vs Radeon R9 280X

Intro

Compare those specifications to the Radeon R9 280X, which has a GPU core clock speed of 850 MHz, and 3072 MB of GDDR5 memory set to run at 1500 MHz through a 384-bit bus. It also is made up of 2048 Stream Processors, 128 Texture Address Units, and 32 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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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 7850		5200 points
	Difference: 3686 (71%)

Zcash Mining Hash Rate

Radeon R9 280X		294 Sol/s
Radeon HD 7850		171 Sol/s
	Difference: 123 (72%)

Ethereum Mining Hash Rate

Radeon R9 280X		21 Mh/s
Radeon HD 7850		13 Mh/s
	Difference: 8 (62%)

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon HD 7850		130 Watts
Radeon R9 280X		250 Watts
	Difference: 120 Watts (92%)

Memory Bandwidth

In theory, the Radeon R9 280X should perform a lot faster than the Radeon HD 7850 in general. (explain)

Radeon R9 280X		288000 MB/sec
Radeon HD 7850		153600 MB/sec
	Difference: 134400 (88%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon R9 280X should be quite a bit (about 98%) more effective at AF than the Radeon HD 7850. (explain)

Radeon R9 280X		108800 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 7850		55040 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 53760 (98%)

Pixel Rate

If using lots of anti-aliasing is important to you, then the Radeon HD 7850 is a better choice, but only just. (explain)

Radeon HD 7850		27520 Mpixels/sec
Radeon R9 280X		27200 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 320 (1%)

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 (in units of megabytes per second) that can be moved over the external memory interface in a second. It is calculated by multiplying the bus width by its memory clock speed. If it uses DDR type RAM, it must be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The better the card's memory bandwidth, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, High Dynamic Range and high resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum texture map elements (texels) that are applied per second. This is worked out by multiplying the total amount of 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 in a second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels the graphics card could possibly record to the 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 the core speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also sometimes called Render Output Units) are responsible for filling the screen with pixels (the image). The actual pixel rate is also dependant on many other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the potential to reach the maximum fill rate.