Radeon R9 280 vs Radeon R9 380 4G

Intro

Compare those specs to the Radeon R9 380 4G, which uses a 28 nm design. AMD has clocked the core speed at 970 MHz. The GDDR5 RAM works at a frequency of 1425 MHz on this particular card. It features 1792 SPUs as well as 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 R9 380 4G		8837 points
Radeon R9 280		7961 points
	Difference: 876 (11%)

Ethereum Mining Hash Rate

Radeon R9 280		22 Mh/s
Radeon R9 380 4G		21 Mh/s
	Difference: 1 (5%)

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon R9 380 4G		190 Watts
Radeon R9 280		250 Watts
	Difference: 60 Watts (32%)

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically speaking, the Radeon R9 280 is 32% quicker than the Radeon R9 380 4G in general, due to its greater data rate. (explain)

Radeon R9 280		240000 MB/sec
Radeon R9 380 4G		182400 MB/sec
	Difference: 57600 (32%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon R9 380 4G will be a small bit (approximately 4%) better at AF than the Radeon R9 280. (explain)

Radeon R9 380 4G		108640 Mtexels/sec
Radeon R9 280		104496 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 4144 (4%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon R9 380 4G will be a bit (about 4%) more effective at full screen anti-aliasing than the Radeon R9 280, and also should be able to handle higher screen resolutions without losing too much performance. (explain)

Radeon R9 380 4G		31040 Mpixels/sec
Radeon R9 280		29856 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 1184 (4%)

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 megabytes per second) that can be transported across the external memory interface in one second. It's calculated by multiplying the interface width by the speed of its memory. If it uses DDR type RAM, the result should be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher the card's memory bandwidth, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, HDR and high resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum amount of texture map elements (texels) that are applied in one second. This figure 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 video card will be at handling texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels in a second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum number of pixels that the graphics chip could possibly record to the local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is worked out by multiplying the amount of ROPs by the the card's clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - sometimes also referred to as Render Output Units) are responsible for drawing the pixels (image) on the screen. The actual pixel output rate is also dependant on quite a few other factors, especially the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the potential to get to the max fill rate.