Radeon HD 7870 vs Radeon R9 M295X

Intro

Compare all of that to the Radeon R9 M295X, which comes with core speeds of 750 MHz on the GPU, and 1375 MHz on the 4096 MB of GDDR5 RAM. It features 2048 SPUs as well as 128 TAUs 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		175 Watts
	Difference: 50 Watts (40%)

Memory Bandwidth

Performance-wise, the Radeon R9 M295X should theoretically be a little bit superior to the Radeon HD 7870 in general. (explain)

Radeon R9 M295X		176000 MB/sec
Radeon HD 7870		153600 MB/sec
	Difference: 22400 (15%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon R9 M295X will be a small bit (approximately 20%) faster with regards to texture filtering than the Radeon HD 7870. (explain)

Radeon R9 M295X		96000 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 7870		80000 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 16000 (20%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon HD 7870 should be much (more or less 33%) more effective at full screen anti-aliasing than the Radeon R9 M295X, and also able to handle higher screen resolutions better. (explain)

Radeon HD 7870		32000 Mpixels/sec
Radeon R9 M295X		24000 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 8000 (33%)

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 maximum amount of data (in units of megabytes per second) that can be moved over the external memory interface in a second. The number is calculated by multiplying the bus width by its memory speed. If the card has DDR RAM, it must be multiplied by 2 once again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The higher the bandwidth is, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, HDR and high resolutions.

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

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum amount of pixels the video card can possibly write to the local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is calculated by multiplying the number of ROPs by the the card's clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - aka Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel output rate is also dependant on quite a few other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the ability to reach the maximum fill rate.