AMD Radeon R9 280 vs AMD Radeon VII

Compare AMD Radeon R9 280 3 GB vs AMD Radeon VII 16 GB, specs and GPU benchmark score. Which is the better graphics card for the money?

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AMD Radeon VII

Price

The cheapest price from our partner retailers

$ 399.00

$ 546.00 significantly less expensive

$ 945.00

Benchmark Score

Overall Score

General gaming and workstation score

1280 points

6138 points

379% significantly better overall score

Flux Core frame rate

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

30 FPS

107 FPS

77 FPS significantly higher Flux Core frame rate

Electron frame rate

Randomly generated noise sphere test

19 FPS

100 FPS

82 FPS significantly higher Electron frame rate

City frame rate

Procedurally generated city scene with voxel rendering

27 FPS

106 FPS

80 FPS significantly higher City frame rate

Clouds frame rate

Real-time noise calculation and ray marching test

10 FPS

56 FPS

46 FPS significantly higher Clouds frame rate

Free GPU Benchmark

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Other Benchmarks

3DMark Graphics score

High-end graphics benchmark

2043 points

9129 points

346% significantly higher 3DMark Graphics score

Specifications

Core Clock Speed

Nominal chip frequency

827 MHz

1400 MHz

69% significantly higher core clock speed

Boost Clock Speed

Higher turbo frequency when power conditions are met

933 MHz

1750 MHz

87% significantly higher boost clock speed

Memory

Onboard memory size for textures and vertices

3 GiB

16 GiB

433% significantly more memory

Memory Bus Width

Number of parallel lines to the memory chips

384 Bit

4096 Bit

966% significantly larger memory bus width

Memory Bandwidth

Data transfer speed between GPU core and memory

240 GB/s

1024 GB/s

326% significantly higher memory bandwidth

TDP

Thermal Design Power: Measure of heat generated by the GPU

250 W

20% slightly lower TDP

300 W

Pixel Rate

Number of pixels that can be rendered per second

29.86 Gigapixels/s

115.26 Gigapixels/s

286% significantly higher pixel rate

Texture Rate

Number of textured pixels that can be rendered per second

104.5 Gigatexels/s

432.24 Gigatexels/s

313% significantly higher texture rate

Floating Point Performance

Raw number of floating point operations per second

3.34 TFLOPS

13.8 TFLOPS

312% significantly better floating point performance

Shading Units

Number of processors dedicated to shader processing

1792

3840

114% significantly more shading units

Texture Mapping Units

Number of processors dedicated to applying textures

112

240

114% significantly more texture mapping units

Render Output Processors

Number of processors dedicated to final pixel rendering

100% significantly more render output processors

Other details

Rank

Ranking in the hardwareDB database

244th of 586

79th of 586

Family

The product line

Radeon R9 200 Series

Radeon RX Vega Series

Release date

The official date of release of this chip

2019 February

Memory Type

The type of memory used by this chip

GDDR5

HBM2

DirectX Support

Maximum version of DirectX supported

12.0

OpenGL Support

Maximum version of OpenGL supported

4.5

4.6

Radeon R9 280 vs Radeon VII benchmarks

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

The Radeon VII 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 VII also has a significantly higher boost clock speed: the maximum frequency the chip can reach if power delivery and thermals allow.

As stated by the manufacturer, the Radeon VII has significantly more memory with 16 GiB of memory compared to 3 GiB. Memory size doesn't directly affect performance, but too little memory will certainly degrade gaming performance.

In addition, the Radeon R9 280 has a slightly lower TDP at 250 W when compared to the Radeon VII at 300 W. Heat output doesn't match power consumption directly but, it's a good estimate.

In terms of raw gaming performance in our GPU benchmark, the Radeon VII is better than the Radeon R9 280.