Radeon HD 7790 vs Radeon R9 280

Intro

Compare all of that to the Radeon R9 280, which comes with core speeds of 933 MHz on the GPU, and 1250 MHz on the 3072 MB of GDDR5 memory. It features 1792 SPUs along with 112 TAUs 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 280		7961 points
Radeon HD 7790		4330 points
	Difference: 3631 (84%)

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon HD 7790		85 Watts
Radeon R9 280		250 Watts
	Difference: 165 Watts (194%)

Memory Bandwidth

In theory, the Radeon R9 280 should be much faster than the Radeon HD 7790 overall. (explain)

Radeon R9 280		240000 MB/sec
Radeon HD 7790		96000 MB/sec
	Difference: 144000 (150%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon R9 280 is a lot (more or less 87%) faster with regards to anisotropic filtering than the Radeon HD 7790. (explain)

Radeon R9 280		104496 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 7790		56000 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 48496 (87%)

Pixel Rate

If running with high levels of AA is important to you, then the Radeon R9 280 is a better choice, by a large margin. (explain)

Radeon R9 280		29856 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 7790		16000 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 13856 (87%)

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 information (in units of MB per second) that can be transported over the external memory interface in a second. It's calculated by multiplying the card's bus width by its memory speed. In the case of DDR RAM, it must be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher the bandwidth is, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, HDR and higher screen resolutions.

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

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