Radeon HD 7870 XT vs Radeon R9 M395X

Intro

Compare all that to the Radeon R9 M395X, which has core speeds of 723 MHz on the GPU, and 1250 MHz on the 4096 MB of GDDR5 RAM. It features 2048 SPUs as well as 128 Texture Address Units and 32 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon R9 M395X		125 Watts
Radeon HD 7870 XT		185 Watts
	Difference: 60 Watts (48%)

Memory Bandwidth

The Radeon HD 7870 XT should in theory be just a bit faster than the Radeon R9 M395X overall. (explain)

Radeon HD 7870 XT		192000 MB/sec
Radeon R9 M395X		160000 MB/sec
	Difference: 32000 (20%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon R9 M395X should be a bit (approximately 4%) more effective at anisotropic filtering than the Radeon HD 7870 XT. (explain)

Radeon R9 M395X		92544 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 7870 XT		88800 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 3744 (4%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon HD 7870 XT is quite a bit (about 28%) more effective at AA than the Radeon R9 M395X, and also should be able to handle higher screen resolutions better. (explain)

Radeon HD 7870 XT		29600 Mpixels/sec
Radeon R9 M395X		23136 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 6464 (28%)

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 (measured in megabytes per second) that can be transported over the external memory interface in a second. The number is calculated by multiplying the interface width by the speed of its memory. In the case of DDR type memory, it should be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The better the card's memory bandwidth, 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 number of texture map elements (texels) that can be applied per second. This is worked out by multiplying the total texture units by the core clock speed of the chip. The better the texel rate, the better the video card will be at texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels per second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum number of pixels the video card can possibly record to its local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is worked out by multiplying the number of ROPs by the the core clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - aka Render Output Units) are responsible for drawing the pixels (image) on the screen. The actual pixel fill rate is also dependant on quite a few other factors, especially the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to reach the maximum fill rate.