AMD Radeon R9 280X vs AMD Radeon RX 480

Compare AMD Radeon R9 280X 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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Specifications
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Benchmark Score

Overall Score

General gaming and workstation score

1687 points

2142 points

26% 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

33 FPS

8 FPS significantly higher Electron frame rate

City frame rate

Procedurally generated city scene with voxel rendering

35 FPS

45 FPS

10 FPS slightly higher City frame rate

Clouds frame rate

Real-time noise calculation and ray marching test

14 FPS

17 FPS

3 FPS slightly higher Clouds frame rate

Free GPU Benchmark

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Other Benchmarks

3DMark Graphics score

High-end graphics benchmark

2350 points

4130 points

75% significantly higher 3DMark Graphics score

Specifications

Core Clock Speed

Nominal chip frequency

850 MHz

1266 MHz

48% significantly higher core clock speed

Boost Clock Speed

Higher turbo frequency when power conditions are met

1000 MHz

1266 MHz

26% 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

288 GB/s

28% 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

32 Gigapixels/s

40.51 Gigapixels/s

26% slightly higher pixel rate

Texture Rate

Number of textured pixels that can be rendered per second

128 Gigatexels/s

182.3 Gigatexels/s

42% slightly higher texture rate

Floating Point Performance

Raw number of floating point operations per second

4.10 TFLOPS

5.83 TFLOPS

42% slightly better floating point performance

Shading Units

Number of processors dedicated to shader processing

2048

2304

12% slightly more shading units

Texture Mapping Units

Number of processors dedicated to applying textures

128

144

12% 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

226th 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 280X vs Radeon RX 480 comparison

According to the hardwareDB Benchmark, the Radeon RX 480 GPU is faster than the Radeon R9 280X in gaming.

In our comparison, 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. 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 480 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 480 has a significantly lower TDP at 150 W when compared to the Radeon R9 280X at 250 W. TDP (Thermal Design Power) measures total heat output from the chip.

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