Radeon R9 280 vs Radeon RX 6800 XT

Intro

Compare all of that to the Radeon RX 6800 XT, which uses a 7 nm design. AMD has set the core speed at 1825 MHz. The GDDR6 memory works at a speed of 2000 MHz on this specific model. It features 4608 SPUs as well as 288 Texture Address Units and 128 ROPs.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon R9 280		250 Watts
Radeon RX 6800 XT		300 Watts
	Difference: 50 Watts (20%)

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically, the Radeon RX 6800 XT should perform much faster than the Radeon R9 280 in general. (explain)

Radeon RX 6800 XT		524288 MB/sec
Radeon R9 280		240000 MB/sec
	Difference: 284288 (118%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon RX 6800 XT will be a lot (more or less 403%) better at AF than the Radeon R9 280. (explain)

Radeon RX 6800 XT		525600 Mtexels/sec
Radeon R9 280		104496 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 421104 (403%)

Pixel Rate

If running with high levels of AA is important to you, then the Radeon RX 6800 XT is the winner, and very much so. (explain)

Radeon RX 6800 XT		233600 Mpixels/sec
Radeon R9 280		29856 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 203744 (682%)

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 maximum amount of information (measured in MB per second) that can be moved across the external memory interface in a second. It's calculated by multiplying the bus width by the speed of its memory. If the card has DDR memory, it must be multiplied by 2 once 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, HDR and high resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum texture map elements (texels) that are applied in one second. This figure is calculated by multiplying the total amount of texture units by the core speed of the chip. The better the texel rate, the better the 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 graphics card can possibly write to the local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is calculated by multiplying the amount of Render Output Units by the the core clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - aka Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel output 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 get to the max fill rate.