AMD Radeon R9 280 vs AMD Radeon HD 8790M

Compare AMD Radeon R9 280 3 GB vs AMD Radeon HD 8790M 2 GB, specs and GPU benchmark score. Which is the better graphics card for the money?

Benchmark Score
Specifications
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Benchmark Score

Overall Score

General gaming and workstation score

1280 points

2682% significantly better overall score

46 points

Flux Core frame rate

Volumetric ray casting test, a computationally expensive method of rendering high-quality scenes

30 FPS

28 FPS significantly higher Flux Core frame rate

2 FPS

Electron frame rate

Randomly generated noise sphere test

19 FPS

18 FPS significantly higher Electron frame rate

0 FPS

City frame rate

Procedurally generated city scene with voxel rendering

27 FPS

26 FPS significantly higher City frame rate

1 FPS

Clouds frame rate

Real-time noise calculation and ray marching test

10 FPS

10 FPS significantly higher Clouds frame rate

0 FPS

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Specifications

Core Clock Speed

Nominal chip frequency

827 MHz

850 MHz

2% slightly higher core clock speed

Boost Clock Speed

Higher turbo frequency when power conditions are met

933 MHz

9% slightly higher boost clock speed

850 MHz

Memory

Onboard memory size for textures and vertices

3 GiB

49% significantly more memory

2 GiB

Memory Bus Width

Number of parallel lines to the memory chips

384 Bit

200% significantly larger memory bus width

128 Bit

Memory Bandwidth

Data transfer speed between GPU core and memory

240 GB/s

274% significantly higher memory bandwidth

64 GB/s

Pixel Rate

Number of pixels that can be rendered per second

29.86 Gigapixels/s

314% significantly higher pixel rate

7.2 Gigapixels/s

Texture Rate

Number of textured pixels that can be rendered per second

104.5 Gigatexels/s

383% significantly higher texture rate

21.6 Gigatexels/s

Shading Units

Number of processors dedicated to shader processing

1792

366% significantly more shading units

384

Texture Mapping Units

Number of processors dedicated to applying textures

112

366% significantly more texture mapping units

Render Output Processors

Number of processors dedicated to final pixel rendering

300% significantly more render output processors

Other details

Rank

Ranking in the hardwareDB database

244th of 586

546th of 586

Family

The product line

Radeon R9 200 Series

Radeon HD 8000M Series

Memory Type

The type of memory used by this chip

GDDR5

DirectX Support

Maximum version of DirectX supported

12.0

11.1

OpenGL Support

Maximum version of OpenGL supported

4.5

4.4

Radeon R9 280 vs Radeon HD 8790M comparison

According to the hardwareDB Benchmark, the Radeon R9 280 GPU is faster than the Radeon HD 8790M in gaming.

In our comparison, the Radeon HD 8790M has a slightly higher core clock speed. This is the frequency at which the graphics core is running at. While not necessarily an indicator of overall performance, this metric can be useful when comparing two GPUs based on the same architecture. Despite this, the Radeon R9 280 has a slightly higher boost clock speed. The boost clock speed is the frequency that the GPU core can reach if the temperature is low enough. The allows for higher performance in certain scenarios.

As stated by the manufacturer, the Radeon R9 280 has significantly more memory with 3 GiB of memory compared to 2 GiB. If you're planning at playing games at high resolutions with high-quality textures, you will need a lot of memory.

According to the results of the hardwareDB benchmark utility, the Radeon R9 280 is faster than the Radeon HD 8790M.