Radeon HD 7950 3GB vs Radeon R9 280

Intro

Compare all of that to the Radeon R9 280, which features GPU clock speed of 933 MHz, and 3072 MB of GDDR5 memory set to run at 1250 MHz through a 384-bit bus. It also features 1792 SPUs, 112 Texture Address Units, and 32 Raster Operation Units.

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.

Zcash Mining Hash Rate

Radeon HD 7950 3GB		229 Sol/s
Radeon R9 280		183 Sol/s
	Difference: 46 (25%)

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon HD 7950 3GB		200 Watts
Radeon R9 280		250 Watts
	Difference: 50 Watts (25%)

Memory Bandwidth

Both cards have exactly the same bandwidth, so in theory they should perform the same. (explain)

Texel Rate

The Radeon R9 280 will be a little bit (approximately 17%) faster with regards to texture filtering than the Radeon HD 7950 3GB. (explain)

Radeon R9 280		104496 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 7950 3GB		89600 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 14896 (17%)

Pixel Rate

If running with a high resolution is important to you, then the Radeon R9 280 is superior to the Radeon HD 7950 3GB, but not by far. (explain)

Radeon R9 280		29856 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 7950 3GB		25600 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 4256 (17%)

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: Memory bandwidth is the max amount of data (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 interface width by its memory clock speed. In the case of DDR type memory, the result should be multiplied by 2 once again. If DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The higher the memory bandwidth, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, HDR and high resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum texture map elements (texels) that are applied in one second. This number is calculated by multiplying the total texture units by the core clock speed of the chip. The better this number, the better the video 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 amount of pixels that the graphics card could possibly write to its local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is calculated by multiplying the number of Raster Operations Pipelines by the the core 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 fill rate also depends on many other factors, especially the memory bandwidth - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the ability to get to the max fill rate.