Radeon HD 7870 XT vs Radeon R9 M295X

Intro

Compare those specifications to the Radeon R9 M295X, which comes with clock speeds of 750 MHz on the GPU, and 1375 MHz on the 4096 MB of GDDR5 memory. It features 2048 SPUs along with 128 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 M295X		125 Watts
Radeon HD 7870 XT		185 Watts
	Difference: 60 Watts (48%)

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically, the Radeon HD 7870 XT should perform a small bit faster than the Radeon R9 M295X in general. (explain)

Radeon HD 7870 XT		192000 MB/sec
Radeon R9 M295X		176000 MB/sec
	Difference: 16000 (9%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon R9 M295X is a bit (about 8%) better at texture filtering than the Radeon HD 7870 XT. (explain)

Radeon R9 M295X		96000 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 7870 XT		88800 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 7200 (8%)

Pixel Rate

If running with a high screen resolution is important to you, then the Radeon HD 7870 XT is the winner, by a large margin. (explain)

Radeon HD 7870 XT		29600 Mpixels/sec
Radeon R9 M295X		24000 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 5600 (23%)

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 information (counted in MB per second) that can be transferred over the external memory interface in a second. The number is calculated by multiplying the interface width by its memory speed. In the case of DDR memory, it should be multiplied by 2 once again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher the bandwidth is, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, High Dynamic Range and high resolutions.

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

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