Radeon HD 7850 vs Radeon R9 M280X

Intro

Compare all that to the Radeon R9 M280X, which uses a 28 nm design. AMD has set the core frequency at 900 MHz. The GDDR5 memory works at a frequency of 1375 MHz on this card. It features 896 SPUs as well as 56 Texture Address Units and 16 ROPs.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon R9 M280X		75 Watts
Radeon HD 7850		130 Watts
	Difference: 55 Watts (73%)

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically, the Radeon HD 7850 should perform much faster than the Radeon R9 M280X overall. (explain)

Radeon HD 7850		153600 MB/sec
Radeon R9 M280X		88000 MB/sec
	Difference: 65600 (75%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 7850 will be just a bit (more or less 9%) faster with regards to anisotropic filtering than the Radeon R9 M280X. (explain)

Radeon HD 7850		55040 Mtexels/sec
Radeon R9 M280X		50400 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 4640 (9%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon HD 7850 is a lot (approximately 91%) better at anti-aliasing than the Radeon R9 M280X, and also able to handle higher resolutions better. (explain)

Radeon HD 7850		27520 Mpixels/sec
Radeon R9 M280X		14400 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 13120 (91%)

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 (counted in megabytes per second) that can be moved past the external memory interface within a second. The number is worked out by multiplying the card's bus width by its memory speed. If the card has DDR RAM, it should be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The better the bandwidth is, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, High Dynamic Range and higher screen resolutions.

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

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum number of pixels the graphics card could possibly record to the local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is worked out by multiplying the amount of Raster Operations Pipelines by the clock speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also sometimes called Render Output Units) are responsible for drawing the pixels (image) on the screen. The actual pixel rate also depends on lots of other factors, especially the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the ability to get to the maximum fill rate.