Radeon HD 7870 XT vs Radeon R9 M280X

Intro

Compare those specs to the Radeon R9 M280X, which has a clock speed of 900 MHz and a GDDR5 memory frequency of 1375 MHz. It also features a 128-bit bus, and makes use of a 28 nm design. It is comprised of 896 SPUs, 56 Texture Address Units, and 16 Raster Operation Units.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon R9 M280X		75 Watts
Radeon HD 7870 XT		185 Watts
	Difference: 110 Watts (147%)

Memory Bandwidth

The Radeon HD 7870 XT should theoretically be quite a bit faster than the Radeon R9 M280X overall. (explain)

Radeon HD 7870 XT		192000 MB/sec
Radeon R9 M280X		88000 MB/sec
	Difference: 104000 (118%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 7870 XT will be much (more or less 76%) more effective at AF than the Radeon R9 M280X. (explain)

Radeon HD 7870 XT		88800 Mtexels/sec
Radeon R9 M280X		50400 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 38400 (76%)

Pixel Rate

If using a high resolution is important to you, then the Radeon HD 7870 XT is a better choice, by a large margin. (explain)

Radeon HD 7870 XT		29600 Mpixels/sec
Radeon R9 M280X		14400 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 15200 (106%)

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 max amount of data (in units of megabytes per second) that can be transported past the external memory interface in one second. It's worked out by multiplying the card's interface width by its memory clock speed. If the card has DDR type memory, the result should be multiplied by 2 once again. If DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The higher the card's memory bandwidth, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, High Dynamic Range and high resolutions.

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

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels the video card could possibly record to its local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is worked out by multiplying the number of colour ROPs by the the card's clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also sometimes called Render Output Units) are responsible for drawing the pixels (image) on the screen. The actual pixel fill rate is also dependant on many other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the ability to reach the maximum fill rate.