Radeon HD 7870 vs Radeon R9 M275X

Intro

Compare those specs to the Radeon R9 M275X, which makes use of a 28 nm design. AMD has clocked the core speed at 900 MHz. The GDDR5 memory works at a speed of 1125 MHz on this particular card. It features 640 SPUs along with 40 TAUs and 16 Rasterization Operator Units.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon R9 M275X		50 Watts
Radeon HD 7870		175 Watts
	Difference: 125 Watts (250%)

Memory Bandwidth

Performance-wise, the Radeon HD 7870 should theoretically be much superior to the Radeon R9 M275X overall. (explain)

Radeon HD 7870		153600 MB/sec
Radeon R9 M275X		72000 MB/sec
	Difference: 81600 (113%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 7870 should be quite a bit (about 122%) better at anisotropic filtering than the Radeon R9 M275X. (explain)

Radeon HD 7870		80000 Mtexels/sec
Radeon R9 M275X		36000 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 44000 (122%)

Pixel Rate

If running with a high resolution is important to you, then the Radeon HD 7870 is superior to the Radeon R9 M275X, by a large margin. (explain)

Radeon HD 7870		32000 Mpixels/sec
Radeon R9 M275X		14400 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 17600 (122%)

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 data (in units of megabytes per second) that can be transferred across the external memory interface within a second. It's worked out by multiplying the interface width by the speed of its memory. If the card has DDR type RAM, the result should be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses 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, HDR and high resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum texture map elements (texels) that are applied in one second. This number is calculated by multiplying the total number of texture units by the core speed of the chip. The better the texel rate, the better the graphics 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 the video card could possibly write 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 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, especially the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the potential to reach the max fill rate.