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Radeon HD 7970 vs Radeon R9 280

Intro

The Radeon HD 7970 comes with a clock frequency of 925 MHz and a GDDR5 memory frequency of 1375 MHz. It also uses a 384-bit bus, and makes use of a 28 nm design. It features 2048 SPUs, 128 Texture Address Units, and 32 ROPs.

Compare all of that to the Radeon R9 280, which features core speeds of 933 MHz on the GPU, and 1250 MHz on the 3072 MB of GDDR5 RAM. It features 1792 SPUs as well as 112 Texture Address Units and 32 Rasterization Operator Units.

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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 in general. (explain)

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

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 7970 should be a bit (more or less 13%) faster with regards to anisotropic 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 using a high resolution is important to you, then the Radeon R9 280 is a better choice, but it probably won't make a huge difference. (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

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Radeon HD 7970

Amazon.com

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Radeon R9 280

Amazon.com

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Please note that the price comparisons are based on search keywords - sometimes it might show cards with very similar names that are not exactly the same as the one chosen in the comparison. We do try to filter out the wrong results as best we can, though.

Specifications

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Model Radeon HD 7970 Radeon R9 280
Manufacturer AMD AMD
Year January 2012 March 2014
Code Name Tahiti XT Tahiti Pro
Memory 3072 MB 3072 MB
Core Speed 925 MHz 933 MHz
Memory Speed 5500 MHz 5000 MHz
Power (Max TDP) 250 watts 250 watts
Bandwidth 264000 MB/sec 240000 MB/sec
Texel Rate 118400 Mtexels/sec 104496 Mtexels/sec
Pixel Rate 29600 Mpixels/sec 29856 Mpixels/sec
Unified Shaders 2048 1792
Texture Mapping Units 128 112
Render Output Units 32 32
Bus Type GDDR5 GDDR5
Bus Width 384-bit 384-bit
Fab Process 28 nm 28 nm
Transistors 4313 million 4313 million
Bus PCIe 3.0 x16 PCIe 3.0 x16
DirectX Version DirectX 11.1 DirectX 11.2
OpenGL Version OpenGL 4.2 OpenGL 4.3

Memory Bandwidth: Memory bandwidth is the max amount of data (in units of megabytes per second) that can be moved past the external memory interface within a second. It's worked out by multiplying the interface width by its memory clock speed. If it uses DDR memory, the result should be multiplied by 2 once again. If DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The better the memory bandwidth, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, High Dynamic Range and high resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum number of texture map elements (texels) that are processed in one second. This is worked out by multiplying the total number of texture units by the core clock speed of the chip. The higher 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 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 amount of Raster Operations Pipelines by the clock speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also called Render Output Units) are responsible for drawing the pixels (image) on the screen. The actual pixel fill rate also depends on many other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the ability to reach the maximum fill rate.

Display Prices

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Radeon HD 7970

Amazon.com

Check prices at:

Radeon R9 280

Amazon.com

Check prices at:

Please note that the price comparisons are based on search keywords - sometimes it might show cards with very similar names that are not exactly the same as the one chosen in the comparison. We do try to filter out the wrong results as best we can, though.

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