Radeon R9 280 vs Radeon RX 5700 XT 50th Anniversary Edition

Intro

Compare those specs to the Radeon RX 5700 XT 50th Anniversary Edition, which has a core clock frequency of 1680 MHz and a GDDR6 memory speed of 1750 MHz. It also features a 256-bit bus, and makes use of a 7 nm design. It is made up of 2560 SPUs, 160 TAUs, and 64 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon RX 5700 XT 50th Anniversary Edition		235 Watts
Radeon R9 280		250 Watts
	Difference: 15 Watts (6%)

Memory Bandwidth

The Radeon RX 5700 XT 50th Anniversary Edition should theoretically perform much faster than the Radeon R9 280 overall. (explain)

Radeon RX 5700 XT 50th Anniversary Edition		458752 MB/sec
Radeon R9 280		240000 MB/sec
	Difference: 218752 (91%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon RX 5700 XT 50th Anniversary Edition should be quite a bit (more or less 157%) more effective at anisotropic filtering than the Radeon R9 280. (explain)

Radeon RX 5700 XT 50th Anniversary Edition		268800 Mtexels/sec
Radeon R9 280		104496 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 164304 (157%)

Pixel Rate

If running with a high screen resolution is important to you, then the Radeon RX 5700 XT 50th Anniversary Edition is a better choice, by a large margin. (explain)

Radeon RX 5700 XT 50th Anniversary Edition		107520 Mpixels/sec
Radeon R9 280		29856 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 77664 (260%)

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 maximum amount of information (in units of megabytes per second) that can be moved across the external memory interface in a second. It is worked out by multiplying the card's bus width by its memory speed. If the card has DDR type RAM, it must be multiplied by 2 again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher 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 number of texture map elements (texels) that can be processed per second. This is calculated by multiplying the total texture units of the card by the core speed of the chip. The better 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 one second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum number of pixels the video card can possibly write to its local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is calculated by multiplying the amount of Render Output Units by the the card's clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - aka Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel fill rate also depends on many other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the ability to reach the maximum fill rate.