Radeon R7 360 vs Radeon R9 M280X

Intro

Compare all of that to the Radeon R9 M280X, which comes with core speeds of 900 MHz on the GPU, and 1375 MHz on the 4096 MB of GDDR5 RAM. It features 896 SPUs along with 56 Texture Address Units and 16 ROPs.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon R9 M280X		75 Watts
Radeon R7 360		100 Watts
	Difference: 25 Watts (33%)

Memory Bandwidth

As far as performance goes, the Radeon R7 360 should theoretically be a bit better than the Radeon R9 M280X overall. (explain)

Radeon R7 360		104000 MB/sec
Radeon R9 M280X		88000 MB/sec
	Difference: 16000 (18%)

Texel Rate

Both cards have the exact same texel fill rate, so in theory they should be equally good at at AF. (explain)

Pixel Rate

If running with high levels of AA is important to you, then the Radeon R7 360 is the winner, though only just barely. (explain)

Radeon R7 360		16800 Mpixels/sec
Radeon R9 M280X		14400 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 2400 (17%)

Please note that the above 'benchmarks' are all just theoretical - the results were calculated based on the card's specifications, and real-world performance may (and probably will) vary at least a bit.

Price Comparison

Specifications

Memory Bandwidth: Memory bandwidth is the max amount of data (counted in megabytes per second) that can be transferred over the external memory interface in a second. It's worked out by multiplying the card's bus width by its memory clock speed. In the case of DDR type memory, the result should be multiplied by 2 once again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The better the bandwidth is, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, HDR and high resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum number of texture map elements (texels) that can be processed per second. This figure is calculated by multiplying the total amount of texture units by the core speed of the chip. The higher the texel rate, the better the graphics card will be at handling texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels in one second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum number of pixels the graphics card could possibly record to the local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is calculated by multiplying the number of colour ROPs by the clock speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - aka Render Output Units) are responsible for drawing the pixels (image) on the screen. The actual pixel rate is also dependant on lots of other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to reach the maximum fill rate.