AMD Radeon R9 280 vs AMD Radeon RX 590

Compare AMD Radeon R9 280 3 GB vs AMD Radeon RX 590 8 GB, specs and GPU benchmark score. Which is the better graphics card for the money?

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AMD Radeon RX 590

Price

The cheapest price from our partner retailers

$ 399.00

$ 248.79

$ 150.21 significantly less expensive

Benchmark Score

Overall Score

General gaming and workstation score

1280 points

2466 points

92% significantly better overall score

Flux Core frame rate

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

30 FPS

52 FPS

21 FPS significantly higher Flux Core frame rate

Electron frame rate

Randomly generated noise sphere test

19 FPS

38 FPS

19 FPS significantly higher Electron frame rate

City frame rate

Procedurally generated city scene with voxel rendering

27 FPS

52 FPS

25 FPS significantly higher City frame rate

Clouds frame rate

Real-time noise calculation and ray marching test

10 FPS

20 FPS

10 FPS significantly higher Clouds frame rate

Free GPU Benchmark

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Other Benchmarks

3DMark Graphics score

High-end graphics benchmark

2043 points

4729 points

131% significantly higher 3DMark Graphics score

Specifications

Core Clock Speed

Nominal chip frequency

827 MHz

1545 MHz

86% significantly higher core clock speed

Boost Clock Speed

Higher turbo frequency when power conditions are met

933 MHz

1545 MHz

65% significantly 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

256 GB/s

6% slightly higher memory bandwidth

TDP

Thermal Design Power: Measure of heat generated by the GPU

250 W

175 W

42% much lower TDP

Pixel Rate

Number of pixels that can be rendered per second

29.86 Gigapixels/s

49.54 Gigapixels/s

65% significantly higher pixel rate

Texture Rate

Number of textured pixels that can be rendered per second

104.5 Gigatexels/s

222.48 Gigatexels/s

112% significantly higher texture rate

Floating Point Performance

Raw number of floating point operations per second

3.34 TFLOPS

7.12 TFLOPS

112% 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

179th of 586

Family

The product line

Radeon R9 200 Series

Radeon RX 500 Series

Release date

The official date of release of this chip

2018 November

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 590 comparison

According to the hardwareDB Benchmark, the Radeon RX 590 GPU is faster than the Radeon R9 280 in gaming.

The Radeon RX 590 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 590 also has a significantly 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.

Furthermore, the spec sheet for both these GPUs show that the Radeon RX 590 has significantly more memory with 8 GiB of memory compared to 3 GiB. If you're planning at playing games at high resolutions with high-quality textures, you will need a lot of memory.

In addition, the Radeon RX 590 has a much lower TDP at 175 W when compared to the Radeon R9 280 at 250 W. TDP (Thermal Design Power) measures total heat output from the chip.

In conclusion, all specs and GPU benchmarks considered, will recommend the Radeon RX 590 over the Radeon R9 280.