Radeon HD 4790 vs Radeon R9 M280X

Intro

Compare those specs to the Radeon R9 M280X, which comes with core speeds of 900 MHz on the GPU, and 1375 MHz on the 4096 MB of GDDR5 RAM. It features 896 SPUs along with 56 Texture Address Units and 16 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Memory Bandwidth

As far as performance goes, the Radeon HD 4790 should theoretically be a little bit superior to the Radeon R9 M280X overall. (explain)

Radeon HD 4790		102400 MB/sec
Radeon R9 M280X		88000 MB/sec
	Difference: 14400 (16%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon R9 M280X should be a lot (about 163%) better at AF than the Radeon HD 4790. (explain)

Radeon R9 M280X		50400 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 4790		19200 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 31200 (163%)

Pixel Rate

If using a high screen resolution is important to you, then the Radeon R9 M280X is superior to the Radeon HD 4790, by a large margin. (explain)

Radeon R9 M280X		14400 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 4790		9600 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 4800 (50%)

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 max amount of information (measured in megabytes per second) that can be transferred over the external memory interface in one second. It is calculated by multiplying the bus width by its memory speed. In the case of DDR type RAM, it should be multiplied by 2 once again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The higher the memory bandwidth, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, High Dynamic Range and higher screen resolutions.

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

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels that the graphics chip can possibly write to the local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is worked out 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 outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel fill rate is also dependant on quite a few other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the potential to reach the maximum fill rate.