Radeon R9 280 vs Radeon RX 6900 XT

Intro

Compare that to the Radeon RX 6900 XT, which comes with a clock speed of 1825 MHz and a GDDR6 memory speed of 2000 MHz. It also uses a 256-bit memory bus, and makes use of a 7 nm design. It is comprised of 5120 SPUs, 320 TAUs, and 128 Raster Operation Units.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon R9 280		250 Watts
Radeon RX 6900 XT		300 Watts
	Difference: 50 Watts (20%)

Memory Bandwidth

As far as performance goes, the Radeon RX 6900 XT should in theory be much superior to the Radeon R9 280 overall. (explain)

Radeon RX 6900 XT		524288 MB/sec
Radeon R9 280		240000 MB/sec
	Difference: 284288 (118%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon RX 6900 XT should be a lot (more or less 459%) better at texture filtering than the Radeon R9 280. (explain)

Radeon RX 6900 XT		584000 Mtexels/sec
Radeon R9 280		104496 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 479504 (459%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon RX 6900 XT will be much (about 682%) faster with regards to FSAA than the Radeon R9 280, and also will be capable of handling higher screen resolutions better. (explain)

Radeon RX 6900 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 largest amount of information (in units of megabytes per second) that can be moved over the external memory interface in one second. It's worked out by multiplying the bus width by its memory clock speed. If it uses DDR memory, it should be multiplied by 2 once again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The higher the 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 number of texture map elements (texels) that can be applied per second. This is calculated by multiplying the total number of texture units of the card by the core clock speed of the chip. The better this number, the better the card will be at texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels in one second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels the graphics card can possibly write to its local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is calculated 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 lots of other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the ability to get to the maximum fill rate.