Radeon HD 7870 XT vs Radeon R9 M290X

Intro

Compare those specifications to the Radeon R9 M290X, which features GPU clock speed of 850 MHz, and 4096 MB of GDDR5 memory running at 1200 MHz through a 256-bit bus. It also is made up of 1280 Stream Processors, 80 Texture Address Units, and 32 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon R9 M290X		100 Watts
Radeon HD 7870 XT		185 Watts
	Difference: 85 Watts (85%)

Memory Bandwidth

In theory, the Radeon HD 7870 XT will be 25% quicker than the Radeon R9 M290X in general, due to its higher data rate. (explain)

Radeon HD 7870 XT		192000 MB/sec
Radeon R9 M290X		153600 MB/sec
	Difference: 38400 (25%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 7870 XT is quite a bit (more or less 31%) more effective at AF than the Radeon R9 M290X. (explain)

Radeon HD 7870 XT		88800 Mtexels/sec
Radeon R9 M290X		68000 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 20800 (31%)

Pixel Rate

If using a high resolution is important to you, then the Radeon HD 7870 XT is superior to the Radeon R9 M290X, though only just barely. (explain)

Radeon HD 7870 XT		29600 Mpixels/sec
Radeon R9 M290X		27200 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 2400 (9%)

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: Memory bandwidth is the max amount of data (in units of megabytes per second) that can be transported across the external memory interface within a second. It is calculated by multiplying the interface width by its memory speed. If it uses DDR type RAM, the result should be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The better the card's memory bandwidth, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, HDR and higher screen resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum number of texture map elements (texels) that are processed in one second. This number is calculated by multiplying the total amount of texture units by the core clock speed of the chip. The better the texel rate, the better the graphics 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 most pixels the video card can possibly write to its local memory per 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 is also dependant on quite a few other factors, especially the memory bandwidth - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the potential to reach the maximum fill rate.