Radeon HD 7970 vs Radeon R9 280

Intro

Compare that 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 runs at a frequency of 1250 MHz on this specific model. It features 1792 SPUs along with 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 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

In theory, the Radeon HD 7970 is 10% faster than the Radeon R9 280 in general, due to its higher data rate. (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 little bit (approximately 13%) more effective at AF than the Radeon R9 280. (explain)

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

Pixel Rate

The Radeon R9 280 should be a little bit (more or less 1%) faster with regards to full screen anti-aliasing than the Radeon HD 7970, and also will be capable of handling higher screen resolutions more effectively. (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 information (in units of megabytes per second) that can be transferred past the external memory interface in one second. It is calculated by multiplying the card's interface width by the speed of its memory. If it uses DDR type RAM, it must be multiplied by 2 again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher the card's 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 number is worked out by multiplying the total texture units of the card by the core speed of the chip. The higher this number, the better the card will be at texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels processed in one second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels the video card can possibly write to the local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is worked out by multiplying the number of colour 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 is also dependant on many other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the potential to get to the maximum fill rate.