AMD Radeon R9 280X vs AMD Radeon R9 390

Compare AMD Radeon R9 280X 3 GB vs AMD Radeon R9 390 8 GB, specs and GPU benchmark score. Which is the better graphics card for the money?

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Benchmark Score

Overall Score

General gaming and workstation score

1687 points

1919 points

13% slightly better overall score

Flux Core frame rate

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

40 FPS

44 FPS

4 FPS slightly higher Flux Core frame rate

Electron frame rate

Randomly generated noise sphere test

25 FPS

28 FPS

4 FPS slightly higher Electron frame rate

City frame rate

Procedurally generated city scene with voxel rendering

35 FPS

39 FPS

4 FPS slightly higher City frame rate

Clouds frame rate

Real-time noise calculation and ray marching test

14 FPS

15 FPS

1 FPS slightly higher Clouds frame rate

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Other Benchmarks

3DMark Graphics score

High-end graphics benchmark

2350 points

3950 points

68% significantly higher 3DMark Graphics score

Specifications

Core Clock Speed

Nominal chip frequency

850 MHz

1000 MHz

17% slightly higher core clock speed

Boost Clock Speed

Higher turbo frequency when power conditions are met

1000 MHz

Identical

1000 MHz

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

512 Bit

33% slightly larger memory bus width

Memory Bandwidth

Data transfer speed between GPU core and memory

288 GB/s

384 GB/s

33% slightly higher memory bandwidth

TDP

Thermal Design Power: Measure of heat generated by the GPU

250 W

10% slightly lower TDP

275 W

Pixel Rate

Number of pixels that can be rendered per second

32 Gigapixels/s

64 Gigapixels/s

100% significantly higher pixel rate

Texture Rate

Number of textured pixels that can be rendered per second

128 Gigatexels/s

160 Gigatexels/s

25% slightly higher texture rate

Floating Point Performance

Raw number of floating point operations per second

4.10 TFLOPS

5.12 TFLOPS

25% slightly better floating point performance

Shading Units

Number of processors dedicated to shader processing

2048

2560

25% slightly more shading units

Texture Mapping Units

Number of processors dedicated to applying textures

128

160

25% slightly 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

226th of 586

215th of 586

Family

The product line

Radeon R9 200 Series

Radeon R9 300 Series

Release date

The official date of release of this chip

2015 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 280X vs Radeon R9 390 specs and performance

For gaming, the Radeon R9 390 graphics card is better than the Radeon R9 280X in our tests.

The Radeon R9 390 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.

Furthermore, the spec sheet for both these GPUs show that the Radeon R9 390 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 R9 280X has a slightly lower TDP at 250 W when compared to the Radeon R9 390 at 275 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 R9 390 is better than the Radeon R9 280X.