Radeon R9 280 vs Radeon RX 470

Intro

Compare all of that to the Radeon RX 470, which makes use of a 14 nm design. AMD has set the core speed at 926 MHz. The GDDR5 RAM is set to run at a frequency of 1650 MHz on this specific card. It features 2048 SPUs as well as 128 TAUs 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 RX 470		11756 points
Radeon R9 280		7961 points
	Difference: 3795 (48%)

Zcash Mining Hash Rate

Radeon RX 470		289 Sol/s
Radeon R9 280		183 Sol/s
	Difference: 106 (58%)

Ethereum Mining Hash Rate

Radeon RX 470		26 Mh/s
Radeon R9 280		22 Mh/s
	Difference: 4 (18%)

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon RX 470		120 Watts
Radeon R9 280		250 Watts
	Difference: 130 Watts (108%)

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically, the Radeon R9 280 should be a small bit faster than the Radeon RX 470 overall. (explain)

Radeon R9 280		240000 MB/sec
Radeon RX 470		211200 MB/sec
	Difference: 28800 (14%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon RX 470 should be a little bit (about 13%) more effective at AF than the Radeon R9 280. (explain)

Radeon RX 470		118528 Mtexels/sec
Radeon R9 280		104496 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 14032 (13%)

Pixel Rate

If using lots of anti-aliasing is important to you, then the Radeon R9 280 is the winner, but only just. (explain)

Radeon R9 280		29856 Mpixels/sec
Radeon RX 470		29632 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 224 (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: Memory bandwidth is the largest amount of data (counted in megabytes per second) that can be transferred across the external memory interface within a second. It is calculated by multiplying the bus width by its memory speed. If the card has DDR memory, it should be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The better the card's 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 texture map elements (texels) that are applied in one second. This is worked out by multiplying the total amount of texture units by the core speed of the chip. The higher the texel rate, the better the card will be at handling texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels applied in one second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels the video card could possibly record to the local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is worked out by multiplying the number of Raster Operations Pipelines by the clock speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also called Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel rate is also dependant on lots of other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to get to the maximum fill rate.