Radeon R7 240 vs Radeon R9 280

Intro

Compare those specs to the Radeon R9 280, which uses a 28 nm design. AMD has set the core speed at 933 MHz. The GDDR5 RAM works at a frequency of 1250 MHz on this card. It features 1792 SPUs as well as 112 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 280		7961 points
Radeon R7 240		1218 points
	Difference: 6743 (554%)

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon R7 240		30 Watts
Radeon R9 280		250 Watts
	Difference: 220 Watts (733%)

Memory Bandwidth

The Radeon R9 280 should in theory be quite a bit faster than the Radeon R7 240 in general. (explain)

Radeon R9 280		240000 MB/sec
Radeon R7 240		28800 MB/sec
	Difference: 211200 (733%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon R9 280 is much (approximately 616%) more effective at texture filtering than the Radeon R7 240. (explain)

Radeon R9 280		104496 Mtexels/sec
Radeon R7 240		14600 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 89896 (616%)

Pixel Rate

If running with lots of anti-aliasing is important to you, then the Radeon R9 280 is superior to the Radeon R7 240, and very much so. (explain)

Radeon R9 280		29856 Mpixels/sec
Radeon R7 240		5840 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 24016 (411%)

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 max amount of data (measured in megabytes per second) that can be transferred across the external memory interface in a second. It is worked out by multiplying the bus width by its memory clock speed. If it uses DDR memory, the result should be multiplied by 2 again. If DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The higher the card's memory bandwidth, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, HDR and high resolutions.

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

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum number of pixels that the graphics chip can possibly write to its local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is worked out by multiplying the number of ROPs by the the core speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - sometimes also referred to as Render Output Units) are responsible for drawing the pixels (image) on the screen. The actual pixel fill rate also depends on quite a few other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the potential to get to the maximum fill rate.