Radeon HD 6790 vs Radeon R9 M290X

Intro

Compare all of that to the Radeon R9 M290X, which has core speeds of 850 MHz on the GPU, and 1200 MHz on the 4096 MB of GDDR5 memory. It features 1280 SPUs as well as 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 6790		150 Watts
	Difference: 50 Watts (50%)

Memory Bandwidth

In theory, the Radeon R9 M290X should be 14% faster than the Radeon HD 6790 overall, due to its greater bandwidth. (explain)

Radeon R9 M290X		153600 MB/sec
Radeon HD 6790		134400 MB/sec
	Difference: 19200 (14%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon R9 M290X will be quite a bit (approximately 102%) better at AF than the Radeon HD 6790. (explain)

Radeon R9 M290X		68000 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 6790		33600 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 34400 (102%)

Pixel Rate

If using a high resolution is important to you, then the Radeon R9 M290X is the winner, by a large margin. (explain)

Radeon R9 M290X		27200 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 6790		13440 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 13760 (102%)

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 transferred across the external memory interface within a second. It's worked out by multiplying the card's bus width by its memory clock speed. If the card has DDR type RAM, it must be multiplied by 2 once again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher the card's memory bandwidth, the better 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 processed in one second. This is calculated by multiplying the total number of texture units of the card by the core speed of the chip. The better the texel rate, the better the video 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 graphics card could possibly write to the local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is calculated by multiplying the number of Render Output Units by the the card's clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - aka Render Output Units) are responsible for drawing the pixels (image) on the screen. The actual pixel output rate is also dependant on lots of other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the ability to reach the max fill rate.