Radeon HD 6970 vs Radeon R9 M275X

Intro

Compare all of that to the Radeon R9 M275X, which comes with core clock speeds of 900 MHz on the GPU, and 1125 MHz on the 2048 MB of GDDR5 memory. It features 640 SPUs along with 40 Texture Address Units and 16 Rasterization Operator Units.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon R9 M275X		50 Watts
Radeon HD 6970		250 Watts
	Difference: 200 Watts (400%)

Memory Bandwidth

In theory, the Radeon HD 6970 should perform a lot faster than the Radeon R9 M275X in general. (explain)

Radeon HD 6970		176000 MB/sec
Radeon R9 M275X		72000 MB/sec
	Difference: 104000 (144%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 6970 is quite a bit (about 135%) faster with regards to anisotropic filtering than the Radeon R9 M275X. (explain)

Radeon HD 6970		84480 Mtexels/sec
Radeon R9 M275X		36000 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 48480 (135%)

Pixel Rate

If running with a high screen resolution is important to you, then the Radeon HD 6970 is a better choice, and very much so. (explain)

Radeon HD 6970		28160 Mpixels/sec
Radeon R9 M275X		14400 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 13760 (96%)

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 data (in units of MB per second) that can be transferred across the external memory interface in one second. It is worked out by multiplying the bus width by its memory clock speed. If the card has DDR type memory, the result should be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The better the memory bandwidth, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, HDR and higher screen resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum number of texture map elements (texels) that can be processed in one second. This is calculated by multiplying the total texture units of the card by the core 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 graphics card can possibly record to the local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is calculated by multiplying the number of ROPs by the the card's clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - aka Render Output Units) are responsible for drawing the pixels (image) on the screen. The actual pixel rate also depends 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 maximum fill rate.