Radeon HD 7970 vs Radeon R9 280

Intro

Compare those specifications to the Radeon R9 280, which comes with a clock speed of 933 MHz and a GDDR5 memory frequency of 1250 MHz. It also uses a 384-bit bus, and uses a 28 nm design. It is made up of 1792 SPUs, 112 Texture Address Units, and 32 ROPs.

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

Theoretically, the Radeon HD 7970 should be 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 just a bit (more or less 13%) more effective at 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

The Radeon R9 280 will be a little bit (more or less 1%) more effective at AA than the Radeon HD 7970, and also capable of handling higher resolutions while still performing well. (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 largest amount of data (in units of megabytes per second) that can be transferred over the external memory interface in one second. It is worked out by multiplying the bus width by its memory clock speed. If the card has DDR RAM, it should be multiplied by 2 again. If DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The better the memory bandwidth, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, High Dynamic Range and higher screen resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum amount of texture map elements (texels) that can be applied in one second. This number is worked out by multiplying the total amount of texture units of the card by the core speed of the chip. The higher this number, the better the video card will be at handling texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels in one second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels that the graphics chip can possibly record to its local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is worked out by multiplying the number 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 filling the screen with pixels (the image). The actual pixel rate also depends on quite a few other factors, especially the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the potential to reach the maximum fill rate.