Radeon HD 7870 XT vs Radeon R9 M290X

Intro

Compare all that to the Radeon R9 M290X, which has a core clock speed of 850 MHz and a GDDR5 memory speed of 1200 MHz. It also makes use of a 256-bit bus, and makes use of a 28 nm design. It is made up of 1280 SPUs, 80 Texture Address Units, and 32 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon R9 M290X		100 Watts
Radeon HD 7870 XT		185 Watts
	Difference: 85 Watts (85%)

Memory Bandwidth

In theory, the Radeon HD 7870 XT will be 25% faster than the Radeon R9 M290X in general, due to its greater bandwidth. (explain)

Radeon HD 7870 XT		192000 MB/sec
Radeon R9 M290X		153600 MB/sec
	Difference: 38400 (25%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 7870 XT should be quite a bit (approximately 31%) faster with regards to AF than the Radeon R9 M290X. (explain)

Radeon HD 7870 XT		88800 Mtexels/sec
Radeon R9 M290X		68000 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 20800 (31%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon HD 7870 XT will be a small bit (about 9%) faster with regards to full screen anti-aliasing than the Radeon R9 M290X, and also able to handle higher resolutions more effectively. (explain)

Radeon HD 7870 XT		29600 Mpixels/sec
Radeon R9 M290X		27200 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 2400 (9%)

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: Bandwidth is the max amount of data (measured in MB per second) that can be transported past the external memory interface in one second. It is calculated by multiplying the card's interface width by its memory clock speed. In the case of DDR RAM, it must be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher the memory bandwidth, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, High Dynamic Range and higher screen resolutions.

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

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