Radeon HD 5870 vs Radeon R9 M290X

Intro

Compare those specs to the Radeon R9 M290X, which has core speeds of 850 MHz on the GPU, and 1200 MHz on the 4096 MB of GDDR5 RAM. It features 1280 SPUs as well as 80 TAUs 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 5870		188 Watts
	Difference: 88 Watts (88%)

Memory Bandwidth

Both cards have exactly the same memory bandwidth, so theoretically they should have the same performance. (explain)

Texel Rate

Both cards have exactly the same texel rate, so theoretically they should perform equally good at at anisotropic filtering. (explain)

Pixel Rate

Both cards have exactly the same pixel rate, so theoretically they should perform equally good at at full screen anti-aliasing, and be capable of handling the same screen resolutions. (explain)

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 (measured in MB per second) that can be transferred past the external memory interface in one second. It is calculated by multiplying the card's bus width by its memory clock speed. If it uses DDR memory, the result should be multiplied by 2 again. If DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The better the card's memory bandwidth, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, High Dynamic Range and high resolutions.

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

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum amount of pixels the video card can possibly write to its local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is worked out by multiplying the amount of colour ROPs by the the card's clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - aka Render Output Units) are responsible for filling the screen with pixels (the image). The actual pixel rate is also dependant on quite a few other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to get to the max fill rate.