In terms of overall gaming performance, the graphical capabilities of the AMD Radeon R9 280X Crossfire are significantly better than the AMD Radeon HD 7970 DirectCU II Edition.

The HD 7970 has a 75 MHz higher core clock speed than the R9 280X, but the R9 280X has 128 more Texture Mapping Units than the HD 7970. As a result, the R9 280X exhibits a 99.2 GTexel/s better Texture Fill Rate than the HD 7970. This still holds weight but shader performance is generally more relevant, particularly since both of these GPUs support at least DirectX 10.

The HD 7970 has a 75 MHz higher core clock speed than the R9 280X, but the R9 280X has 32 more Render Output Units than the HD 7970. As a result, the R9 280X exhibits a 24.8 GPixel/s better Pixel Fill Rate than the HD 7970. However, both GPUs support DirectX 9 or above, and pixeling performance is only really relevant when comparing older cards.

The R9 280X was released over a year more recently than the HD 7970, and so the R9 280X is likely to have better driver support, meaning it will be more optimized for running the latest games when compared to the HD 7970.

Both GPUs exhibit very powerful performance, so it probably isn't worth upgrading from one to the other, as both are capable of running even the most demanding games at the highest settings.

The R9 280X has 3072 MB more video memory than the HD 7970, so is likely to be much better at displaying game textures at higher resolutions. This is supported by the fact that the R9 280X also has superior memory performance overall.

The R9 280X has 312 GB/sec greater memory bandwidth than the HD 7970, which means that the memory performance of the R9 280X is massively better than the HD 7970.

The Radeon R9 280X Crossfire has 4096 Shader Processing Units and the Radeon HD 7970 DirectCU II Edition has 2048. However, the actual shader performance of the HD 7970 is 1610. The R9 280X having 2486 better shader performance and an altogether better performance when taking into account other relevant data means that the R9 280X delivers a massively smoother and more efficient experience when processing graphical data than the HD 7970.

The Radeon R9 280X Crossfire requires 550 Watts to run but there is no entry for the Radeon HD 7970 DirectCU II Edition. We would recommend a PSU with at least 1000 Watts for the R9 280X.