Radeon R7 250X 2GB vs Radeon R9 270

Intro

Compare all of that to the Radeon R9 270, which comes with clock speeds of 900 MHz on the GPU, and 1400 MHz on the 2048 MB of GDDR5 memory. It features 1280 SPUs as well as 80 TAUs and 32 ROPs.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon R7 250X 2GB		95 Watts
Radeon R9 270		150 Watts
	Difference: 55 Watts (58%)

Memory Bandwidth

In theory, the Radeon R9 270 should be much faster than the Radeon R7 250X 2GB overall. (explain)

Radeon R9 270		179200 MB/sec
Radeon R7 250X 2GB		72000 MB/sec
	Difference: 107200 (149%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon R9 270 will be quite a bit (more or less 80%) more effective at anisotropic filtering than the Radeon R7 250X 2GB. (explain)

Radeon R9 270		72000 Mtexels/sec
Radeon R7 250X 2GB		40000 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 32000 (80%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon R9 270 should be a lot (about 80%) better at anti-aliasing than the Radeon R7 250X 2GB, and should be able to handle higher resolutions while still performing well. (explain)

Radeon R9 270		28800 Mpixels/sec
Radeon R7 250X 2GB		16000 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 12800 (80%)

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 largest amount of information (in units of MB per second) that can be moved over the external memory interface in one second. It's calculated by multiplying the card's interface width by the speed of its memory. In the case of DDR type memory, it should be multiplied by 2 once again. If 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, HDR and high resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum amount of texture map elements (texels) that are applied in one second. This number is worked out by multiplying the total number of texture units of the card by the core clock speed of the chip. The better this number, the better the 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 maximum number of pixels that the graphics chip could possibly record to the local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is calculated by multiplying the amount of Raster Operations Pipelines by the the core speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also sometimes called Render Output Units) are responsible for filling the screen with pixels (the image). 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 memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to reach the max fill rate.