Radeon HD 7850 vs Radeon R9 280

Intro

Compare those specs to the Radeon R9 280, which makes use of a 28 nm design. AMD has clocked the core speed at 933 MHz. The GDDR5 RAM works at a speed of 1250 MHz on this model. It features 1792 SPUs as well as 112 Texture Address Units and 32 Rasterization Operator Units.

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 HD 7850		5200 points
	Difference: 2761 (53%)

Zcash Mining Hash Rate

Radeon R9 280		183 Sol/s
Radeon HD 7850		171 Sol/s
	Difference: 12 (7%)

Ethereum Mining Hash Rate

Radeon R9 280		22 Mh/s
Radeon HD 7850		13 Mh/s
	Difference: 9 (69%)

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

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

Memory Bandwidth

Performance-wise, the Radeon R9 280 should in theory be quite a bit better than the Radeon HD 7850 overall. (explain)

Radeon R9 280		240000 MB/sec
Radeon HD 7850		153600 MB/sec
	Difference: 86400 (56%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon R9 280 should be a lot (approximately 90%) better at anisotropic filtering than the Radeon HD 7850. (explain)

Radeon R9 280		104496 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 7850		55040 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 49456 (90%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon R9 280 should be a bit (approximately 8%) better at AA than the Radeon HD 7850, and should be able to handle higher resolutions better. (explain)

Radeon R9 280		29856 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 7850		27520 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 2336 (8%)

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 (measured in MB per second) that can be moved over the external memory interface in a second. It is worked out by multiplying the card's bus width by its memory speed. If it uses DDR memory, it must be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher the bandwidth is, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, High Dynamic Range and high resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum amount of texture map elements (texels) that can be applied per second. This number is worked out by multiplying the total number of texture units 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 per second.

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