Radeon HD 7970 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 frequency at 933 MHz. The GDDR5 RAM is set to run at a speed of 1250 MHz on this model. It features 1792 SPUs along with 112 TAUs 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 HD 7970		8225 points
Radeon R9 280		7961 points
	Difference: 264 (3%)

Ethereum Mining Hash Rate

Radeon R9 280		22 Mh/s
Radeon HD 7970		21 Mh/s
	Difference: 1 (5%)

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Both cards have the same power consumption.

Memory Bandwidth

The Radeon HD 7970 should in theory perform just a bit faster than the Radeon R9 280 overall. (explain)

Radeon HD 7970		264000 MB/sec
Radeon R9 280		240000 MB/sec
	Difference: 24000 (10%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 7970 will be a bit (more or less 13%) faster with regards to texture filtering than the Radeon R9 280. (explain)

Radeon HD 7970		118400 Mtexels/sec
Radeon R9 280		104496 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 13904 (13%)

Pixel Rate

If running with a high screen resolution is important to you, then the Radeon R9 280 is a better choice, not by a very large margin though. (explain)

Radeon R9 280		29856 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 7970		29600 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 256 (1%)

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 max amount of data (measured in MB per second) that can be transported over the external memory interface in a second. The number is worked out by multiplying the bus width by the speed of its memory. If the card has DDR type RAM, it should be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The better the bandwidth is, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, High Dynamic Range and high resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum amount of texture map elements (texels) that are applied per second. This number is worked out by multiplying the total texture units of the card by the core 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 that the graphics chip could possibly write to its local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is worked out by multiplying the amount of Raster Operations Pipelines by the the core 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 output rate is also dependant on quite a few other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the ability to get to the max fill rate.