Radeon HD 7970 vs Radeon R7 M260X

Intro

Compare those specifications to the Radeon R7 M260X, which comes with clock speeds of 825 MHz on the GPU, and 1000 MHz on the 2048 MB of GDDR5 RAM. It features 384 SPUs along with 24 Texture Address Units and 8 Rasterization Operator Units.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Memory Bandwidth

Performance-wise, the Radeon HD 7970 should in theory be quite a bit better than the Radeon R7 M260X overall. (explain)

Radeon HD 7970		264000 MB/sec
Radeon R7 M260X		64000 MB/sec
	Difference: 200000 (313%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 7970 will be quite a bit (about 498%) more effective at anisotropic filtering than the Radeon R7 M260X. (explain)

Radeon HD 7970		118400 Mtexels/sec
Radeon R7 M260X		19800 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 98600 (498%)

Pixel Rate

If running with a high resolution is important to you, then the Radeon HD 7970 is the winner, by far. (explain)

Radeon HD 7970		29600 Mpixels/sec
Radeon R7 M260X		6600 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 23000 (348%)

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 information (counted in MB per second) that can be moved over the external memory interface in a second. It's calculated by multiplying the bus width by the speed of its memory. In the case of DDR RAM, the result should be multiplied by 2 once again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The better the bandwidth is, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, HDR and high resolutions.

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

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum number of pixels the video card can possibly write to its local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is calculated by multiplying the number of Render Output Units by the the card's clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - sometimes also referred to as 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, most notably the memory bandwidth - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the ability to get to the maximum fill rate.