AMD Radeon HD 7950 vs R9 280

Because two cards have the same number of ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines), and the AMD Radeon R9 280 GPU operates at insignificantly higher frequency, it also has higher pixel fillrate. Having better pixel fillrate allows the graphics card to draw more pixels on screen and off screen, which is beneficial for some 3D effects in games, or when playing at higher display resolutions.

Another important factor, that influences overall GPU performance, is texture fillrate. This parameter is calculated as the number of TMUs, multiplied by graphics clock. Since both graphics cards have the same number of Texture Mapping Units (TMUs) and the Radeon R9 280 card is clocked a bit higher, its texture fillrate is higher. Better texture fill rate means that the GPU can apply more textures and/or utilize more complex 3D effects for each texel, which improves visual appearance of games and generated images.

Single Precision performance indicates how fast the graphics card is at running applications, that process only single-precision floating point data. The performance is measured in GFLOPS, which stands for Giga (billions of) Floating Point Operations Per Second. All single-precision calculations are performed by CUDA cores or stream processors, therefore the more cores / processors the GPU has the better. Performance also depends on the processor clock speed. The AMD Radeon R9 280 is faster here. Higher single-precision performance number means the graphics unit will perform better in general computing applications. Since CUDA cores or stream processors are also used as vertex and geometry shaders for 3D image generation, higher performance is also beneficial to games.

Maximum Double Precision performance is similar to the Single Precision performance, except that it applies to double-precision (64-bit) floating point operations. This characteristic is unrelated to games performance because games do not use double-precision arithmetics. The AMD Radeon HD 7950 has a very significant advantage here.

Memory bandwidth of both graphics cards is identical.