Radeon R9 285 vs Radeon R9 M290X

Intro

Compare all of that to the Radeon R9 M290X, which features a clock frequency of 850 MHz and a GDDR5 memory speed of 1200 MHz. It also features a 256-bit memory bus, and uses 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 R9 285		190 Watts
	Difference: 90 Watts (90%)

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically speaking, the Radeon R9 285 will be 15% faster than the Radeon R9 M290X overall, due to its greater data rate. (explain)

Radeon R9 285		176000 MB/sec
Radeon R9 M290X		153600 MB/sec
	Difference: 22400 (15%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon R9 285 will be quite a bit (about 51%) more effective at anisotropic filtering than the Radeon R9 M290X. (explain)

Radeon R9 285		102816 Mtexels/sec
Radeon R9 M290X		68000 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 34816 (51%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon R9 285 is a small bit (approximately 8%) better at AA than the Radeon R9 M290X, and also will be able to handle higher resolutions more effectively. (explain)

Radeon R9 285		29376 Mpixels/sec
Radeon R9 M290X		27200 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 2176 (8%)

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's calculated by multiplying the interface width by its memory clock speed. In the case of DDR type RAM, it should be multiplied by 2 again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The better the card's memory bandwidth, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, HDR and higher screen resolutions.

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

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum amount 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 Render Output Units by the the core speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also called Render Output Units) are responsible for drawing the pixels (image) on the screen. The actual pixel fill rate also depends on many other factors, especially the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the ability to reach the max fill rate.