Radeon HD 5970 vs Radeon R9 M290X

Intro

Compare all that to the Radeon R9 M290X, which makes use of a 28 nm design. AMD has clocked the core speed at 850 MHz. The GDDR5 RAM works at a speed of 1200 MHz on this particular model. It features 1280 SPUs along with 80 Texture Address Units and 32 Rasterization Operator Units.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon R9 M290X		100 Watts
Radeon HD 5970		294 Watts
	Difference: 194 Watts (194%)

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically, the Radeon HD 5970 should perform much faster than the Radeon R9 M290X overall. (explain)

Radeon HD 5970		256000 MB/sec
Radeon R9 M290X		153600 MB/sec
	Difference: 102400 (67%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 5970 should be a lot (more or less 241%) faster with regards to texture filtering than the Radeon R9 M290X. (explain)

Radeon HD 5970		232000 Mtexels/sec
Radeon R9 M290X		68000 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 164000 (241%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon HD 5970 should be quite a bit (more or less 241%) faster with regards to full screen anti-aliasing than the Radeon R9 M290X, and also should be able to handle higher screen resolutions without slowing down too much. (explain)

Radeon HD 5970		92800 Mpixels/sec
Radeon R9 M290X		27200 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 65600 (241%)

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.

One or more cards in this comparison are multi-core. This means that their bandwidth, texel and pixel rates are theoretically doubled - this does not mean the card will actually perform twice as fast, but only that it should in theory be able to. Actual game benchmarks will give a more accurate idea of what it's capable of.

Price Comparison

Specifications

Memory Bandwidth: Memory bandwidth is the maximum amount of information (measured in MB per second) that can be moved across the external memory interface in a second. The number is worked out by multiplying the bus width by its memory speed. If it uses DDR type memory, the result should be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The better the bandwidth is, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, HDR and higher screen resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum texture map elements (texels) that can be processed per second. This 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 most pixels the video card could possibly record to its local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is calculated by multiplying the number of Raster Operations Pipelines by the the card's clock speed. 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 output rate also depends on many other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the ability to get to the max fill rate.