Radeon HD 6990 vs Radeon R9 280X

Intro

Compare all of that to the Radeon R9 280X, which features core clock 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 TAUs and 32 Rasterization Operator Units.

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 6990		5820 points
	Difference: 3066 (53%)

Ethereum Mining Hash Rate

Radeon HD 6990		24 Mh/s
Radeon R9 280X		21 Mh/s
	Difference: 3 (14%)

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon R9 280X		250 Watts
Radeon HD 6990		375 Watts
	Difference: 125 Watts (50%)

Memory Bandwidth

Performance-wise, the Radeon HD 6990 should theoretically be a bit superior to the Radeon R9 280X in general. (explain)

Radeon HD 6990		320000 MB/sec
Radeon R9 280X		288000 MB/sec
	Difference: 32000 (11%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 6990 will be a lot (more or less 46%) more effective at texture filtering than the Radeon R9 280X. (explain)

Radeon HD 6990		159360 Mtexels/sec
Radeon R9 280X		108800 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 50560 (46%)

Pixel Rate

If using lots of anti-aliasing is important to you, then the Radeon HD 6990 is a better choice, by a large margin. (explain)

Radeon HD 6990		53120 Mpixels/sec
Radeon R9 280X		27200 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 25920 (95%)

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.

One or more cards in this comparison are multi-core. This means that their bandwidth, texel and pixel rates are theoretically doubled - this does not mean the card will actually perform twice as fast, but only that it should in theory be able to. Actual game benchmarks will give a more accurate idea of what it's capable of.

Price Comparison

Specifications

Memory Bandwidth: Bandwidth is the largest amount of information (counted in 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 its memory clock speed. If the card has DDR RAM, the result should be multiplied by 2 once again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher 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 number of texture map elements (texels) that can be processed in one second. This is worked out by multiplying the total number of texture units of the card by the core speed of the chip. The better this number, the better the video card will be at handling texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels processed per second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum number of pixels that the graphics card could possibly record to its local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is worked out by multiplying the number of colour ROPs by the the core clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - aka Render Output Units) are responsible for filling the screen with pixels (the image). The actual pixel fill rate also depends on quite a few other factors, especially the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the ability to reach the max fill rate.