AMD Radeon R9 280 vs AMD Radeon RX 480

Compare AMD Radeon R9 280 3 GB vs AMD Radeon RX 480 8 GB, specs and GPU benchmark score. Which is the better graphics card for the money?

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AMD Radeon RX 480

Price

The cheapest price from our partner retailers

$ 399.00

$ 1269.98 significantly less expensive

$ 1668.98

Benchmark Score

Overall Score

General gaming and workstation score

1280 points

2142 points

67% significantly better overall score

Flux Core frame rate

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

30 FPS

44 FPS

14 FPS significantly higher Flux Core frame rate

Electron frame rate

Randomly generated noise sphere test

19 FPS

33 FPS

14 FPS significantly higher Electron frame rate

City frame rate

Procedurally generated city scene with voxel rendering

27 FPS

45 FPS

19 FPS significantly higher City frame rate

Clouds frame rate

Real-time noise calculation and ray marching test

10 FPS

17 FPS

7 FPS significantly higher Clouds frame rate

Free GPU Benchmark

Want to compare your graphics card against the Radeon R9 280 and the Radeon RX 480? Download our free and quick PC Performance Test.

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Other Benchmarks

3DMark Graphics score

High-end graphics benchmark

2043 points

4130 points

102% significantly higher 3DMark Graphics score

Specifications

Core Clock Speed

Nominal chip frequency

827 MHz

1266 MHz

53% significantly higher core clock speed

Boost Clock Speed

Higher turbo frequency when power conditions are met

933 MHz

1266 MHz

35% slightly higher boost clock speed

Memory

Onboard memory size for textures and vertices

3 GiB

8 GiB

166% significantly more memory

Memory Bus Width

Number of parallel lines to the memory chips

384 Bit

49% significantly larger memory bus width

256 Bit

Memory Bandwidth

Data transfer speed between GPU core and memory

240 GB/s

7% slightly higher memory bandwidth

224 GB/s

TDP

Thermal Design Power: Measure of heat generated by the GPU

250 W

150 W

66% significantly lower TDP

Pixel Rate

Number of pixels that can be rendered per second

29.86 Gigapixels/s

40.51 Gigapixels/s

35% slightly higher pixel rate

Texture Rate

Number of textured pixels that can be rendered per second

104.5 Gigatexels/s

182.3 Gigatexels/s

74% significantly higher texture rate

Floating Point Performance

Raw number of floating point operations per second

3.34 TFLOPS

5.83 TFLOPS

74% significantly better floating point performance

Shading Units

Number of processors dedicated to shader processing

1792

2304

28% slightly more shading units

Texture Mapping Units

Number of processors dedicated to applying textures

112

144

28% slightly more texture mapping units

Render Output Processors

Number of processors dedicated to final pixel rendering

Identical

Other details

Rank

Ranking in the hardwareDB database

244th of 586

199th of 586

Family

The product line

Radeon R9 200 Series

Radeon RX 400 Series

Release date

The official date of release of this chip

2016 June

Memory Type

The type of memory used by this chip

GDDR5

DirectX Support

Maximum version of DirectX supported

12.0

OpenGL Support

Maximum version of OpenGL supported

4.5

Radeon R9 280 vs Radeon RX 480 benchmarks

For gaming, the Radeon RX 480 graphics card is better than the Radeon R9 280 in our tests.

The Radeon RX 480 has a significantly 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. In addition, the Radeon RX 480 also has a slightly higher boost clock speed. This is a frequency that can be reached if the GPU is cooled sufficiently and has enough power.

As stated by the manufacturer, the Radeon RX 480 has significantly more memory with 8 GiB of memory compared to 3 GiB. Lots of memory is good when playing at high resolutions or with many monitors.

In addition, the Radeon RX 480 has a significantly lower TDP at 150 W when compared to the Radeon R9 280 at 250 W. This is not a measure of performance, but rather the amount of heat generated by the chip when running at its highest speed.

According to the results of the hardwareDB benchmark utility, the Radeon RX 480 is faster than the Radeon R9 280.