AMD Radeon R9 280X vs AMD Radeon RX 6500 XT

Compare AMD Radeon R9 280X 3 GB vs AMD Radeon RX 6500 XT 4 GB, specs and GPU benchmark score. Which is the better graphics card for the money?

Benchmark Score
Other Benchmarks
Specifications
Comments (0)
Popular Comparisons

GPU Comparison

Quickly search and compare graphics cards

Benchmark Score

Overall Score

General gaming and workstation score

1687 points

3023 points

79% significantly better overall score

Flux Core frame rate

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

40 FPS

64 FPS

24 FPS significantly higher Flux Core frame rate

Electron frame rate

Randomly generated noise sphere test

25 FPS

46 FPS

21 FPS significantly higher Electron frame rate

City frame rate

Procedurally generated city scene with voxel rendering

35 FPS

56 FPS

21 FPS significantly higher City frame rate

Clouds frame rate

Real-time noise calculation and ray marching test

14 FPS

26 FPS

12 FPS significantly higher Clouds frame rate

Free GPU Benchmark

Want to compare your graphics card against the Radeon R9 280X and the Radeon RX 6500 XT? Download our free and quick PC Performance Test.

Download GPU Benchmark

Other Benchmarks

3DMark Graphics score

High-end graphics benchmark

2350 points

4965 points

111% significantly higher 3DMark Graphics score

Specifications

Core Clock Speed

Nominal chip frequency

850 MHz

2310 MHz

171% significantly higher core clock speed

Boost Clock Speed

Higher turbo frequency when power conditions are met

1000 MHz

2815 MHz

181% significantly higher boost clock speed

Memory

Onboard memory size for textures and vertices

3 GiB

4 GiB

33% slightly more memory

Memory Bus Width

Number of parallel lines to the memory chips

384 Bit

499% significantly larger memory bus width

64 Bit

Memory Bandwidth

Data transfer speed between GPU core and memory

288 GB/s

100% significantly higher memory bandwidth

144 GB/s

TDP

Thermal Design Power: Measure of heat generated by the GPU

250 W

107 W

133% significantly lower TDP

Pixel Rate

Number of pixels that can be rendered per second

32 Gigapixels/s

90.1 Gigapixels/s

181% significantly higher pixel rate

Texture Rate

Number of textured pixels that can be rendered per second

128 Gigatexels/s

180.2 Gigatexels/s

40% slightly higher texture rate

Floating Point Performance

Raw number of floating point operations per second

4.10 TFLOPS

5.77 TFLOPS

40% slightly better floating point performance

Shading Units

Number of processors dedicated to shader processing

2048

100% significantly more shading units

1024

Texture Mapping Units

Number of processors dedicated to applying textures

128

100% significantly 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

154th of 586

Family

The product line

Radeon R9 200 Series

Radeon RX 6000 Series

Release date

The official date of release of this chip

2022 January

Memory Type

The type of memory used by this chip

GDDR5

GDDR6

DirectX Support

Maximum version of DirectX supported

12.0

OpenGL Support

Maximum version of OpenGL supported

4.5

4.6

Radeon R9 280X vs Radeon RX 6500 XT specs and performance

For gaming, the Radeon RX 6500 XT graphics card is better than the Radeon R9 280X in our tests.

In our comparison, the Radeon RX 6500 XT has a significantly higher core clock speed. The core clock speed (or base speed) is the frequency at which the GPU core runs. This metric makes sense when comparing GPUs of a similar architecture or generation. In addition, the Radeon RX 6500 XT 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.

As stated by the manufacturer, the Radeon RX 6500 XT has slightly more memory with 4 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 RX 6500 XT has a significantly lower TDP at 107 W when compared to the Radeon R9 280X 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 6500 XT is faster than the Radeon R9 280X.