Radeon HD 7870 vs Radeon R9 280

Intro

Compare all that to the Radeon R9 280, which has core clock speeds of 933 MHz on the GPU, and 1250 MHz on the 3072 MB of GDDR5 memory. It features 1792 SPUs as well as 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 7870		6230 points
	Difference: 1731 (28%)

Zcash Mining Hash Rate

Radeon R9 280		183 Sol/s
Radeon HD 7870		172 Sol/s
	Difference: 11 (6%)

Ethereum Mining Hash Rate

Radeon R9 280		22 Mh/s
Radeon HD 7870		16 Mh/s
	Difference: 6 (38%)

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

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

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically, the Radeon R9 280 should be much faster than the Radeon HD 7870 in general. (explain)

Radeon R9 280		240000 MB/sec
Radeon HD 7870		153600 MB/sec
	Difference: 86400 (56%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon R9 280 should be much (more or less 31%) more effective at anisotropic filtering than the Radeon HD 7870. (explain)

Radeon R9 280		104496 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 7870		80000 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 24496 (31%)

Pixel Rate

If running with a high screen resolution is important to you, then the Radeon HD 7870 is the winner, but it probably won't make a huge difference. (explain)

Radeon HD 7870		32000 Mpixels/sec
Radeon R9 280		29856 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 2144 (7%)

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 data (counted in MB per second) that can be transferred past the external memory interface in one second. The number is calculated by multiplying the bus width by its memory clock speed. In the case of DDR type memory, it must be multiplied by 2 once again. If DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The higher the bandwidth is, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, HDR and high resolutions.

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

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum amount of pixels the graphics card can possibly write to its local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is calculated by multiplying the number of Render Output Units by the the core speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also sometimes called Render Output Units) are responsible for drawing the pixels (image) on the screen. The actual pixel fill rate also depends on lots of other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the ability to get to the max fill rate.