Radeon HD 7850 vs Radeon R9 280

Intro

Compare those specifications to the Radeon R9 280, which uses a 28 nm design. AMD has clocked the core speed at 933 MHz. The GDDR5 RAM runs at a speed of 1250 MHz on this specific card. 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

The Radeon R9 280 should theoretically be much faster 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 will be much (more or less 90%) better at texture filtering than the Radeon HD 7850. (explain)

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

Pixel Rate

If running with a high screen resolution is important to you, then the Radeon R9 280 is the winner, but not by far. (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 information (counted in megabytes per second) that can be transferred across the external memory interface within a second. The number is worked out by multiplying the card's bus width by its memory speed. If the card has DDR memory, it should be multiplied by 2 again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher the memory bandwidth, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, HDR and higher screen resolutions.

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

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum number of pixels the graphics card could possibly write to the local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is worked out by multiplying the number of ROPs by the clock speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also sometimes called Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel output rate also depends on lots of other factors, especially the memory bandwidth - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to get to the max fill rate.