Radeon HD 5830 vs Radeon R9 M290X

Intro

Compare those specifications to the Radeon R9 M290X, which comes with a core clock frequency of 850 MHz and a GDDR5 memory speed of 1200 MHz. It also features a 256-bit bus, and makes use of a 28 nm design. It is comprised of 1280 SPUs, 80 Texture Address Units, and 32 Raster Operation Units.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon R9 M290X		100 Watts
Radeon HD 5830		175 Watts
	Difference: 75 Watts (75%)

Memory Bandwidth

In theory, the Radeon R9 M290X will be 20% quicker than the Radeon HD 5830 in general, due to its higher data rate. (explain)

Radeon R9 M290X		153600 MB/sec
Radeon HD 5830		128000 MB/sec
	Difference: 25600 (20%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon R9 M290X should be much (approximately 52%) more effective at texture filtering than the Radeon HD 5830. (explain)

Radeon R9 M290X		68000 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 5830		44800 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 23200 (52%)

Pixel Rate

If using lots of anti-aliasing is important to you, then the Radeon R9 M290X is the winner, by far. (explain)

Radeon R9 M290X		27200 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 5830		12800 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 14400 (113%)

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 largest amount of data (in units of megabytes per second) that can be moved across the external memory interface within a second. It is calculated by multiplying the card's interface width by its memory clock speed. If it uses DDR type RAM, it should be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher the card's memory bandwidth, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, High Dynamic Range and high resolutions.

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

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum amount of pixels that the graphics card can possibly write to the local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is worked out by multiplying the amount 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 output rate also depends on quite a few other factors, especially the memory bandwidth - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the ability to reach the maximum fill rate.