Radeon R9 380 4G vs Radeon R9 M290X

Intro

Compare all that to the Radeon R9 M290X, which uses a 28 nm design. AMD has clocked the core frequency at 850 MHz. The GDDR5 memory is set to run at a speed of 1200 MHz on this particular model. It features 1280 SPUs along with 80 Texture Address Units and 32 Rasterization Operator Units.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon R9 M290X		100 Watts
Radeon R9 380 4G		190 Watts
	Difference: 90 Watts (90%)

Memory Bandwidth

The Radeon R9 380 4G should theoretically perform a small bit faster than the Radeon R9 M290X overall. (explain)

Radeon R9 380 4G		182400 MB/sec
Radeon R9 M290X		153600 MB/sec
	Difference: 28800 (19%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon R9 380 4G should be a lot (more or less 60%) better at anisotropic filtering than the Radeon R9 M290X. (explain)

Radeon R9 380 4G		108640 Mtexels/sec
Radeon R9 M290X		68000 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 40640 (60%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon R9 380 4G should be a little bit (about 14%) more effective at AA than the Radeon R9 M290X, and also will be capable of handling higher resolutions without slowing down too much. (explain)

Radeon R9 380 4G		31040 Mpixels/sec
Radeon R9 M290X		27200 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 3840 (14%)

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 maximum amount of information (measured in megabytes per second) that can be transported across the external memory interface in one second. The number is calculated by multiplying the card's interface width by the speed of its memory. If it uses DDR type memory, the result should be multiplied by 2 once again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher the card's memory bandwidth, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, High Dynamic Range and high resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum texture map elements (texels) that are processed per second. This is worked out by multiplying the total texture units of the card by the core clock speed of the chip. The higher this number, the better the video card will be at 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 that the graphics card could possibly write to its local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is calculated by multiplying the amount of Raster Operations Pipelines by the the core clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - sometimes also referred to as Render Output Units) are responsible for filling the screen with pixels (the image). The actual pixel rate also depends on lots of other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the potential to get to the maximum fill rate.