Radeon HD 7970 vs Radeon R9 M280X

Intro

Compare all that to the Radeon R9 M280X, which features core speeds of 900 MHz on the GPU, and 1375 MHz on the 4096 MB of GDDR5 RAM. It features 896 SPUs along with 56 TAUs and 16 Rasterization Operator Units.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon R9 M280X		75 Watts
Radeon HD 7970		250 Watts
	Difference: 175 Watts (233%)

Memory Bandwidth

Performance-wise, the Radeon HD 7970 should in theory be a lot better than the Radeon R9 M280X in general. (explain)

Radeon HD 7970		264000 MB/sec
Radeon R9 M280X		88000 MB/sec
	Difference: 176000 (200%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 7970 will be much (more or less 135%) more effective at anisotropic filtering than the Radeon R9 M280X. (explain)

Radeon HD 7970		118400 Mtexels/sec
Radeon R9 M280X		50400 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 68000 (135%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon HD 7970 is a lot (approximately 106%) more effective at AA than the Radeon R9 M280X, and will be capable of handling higher resolutions without losing too much performance. (explain)

Radeon HD 7970		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: Memory bandwidth is the maximum amount of data (counted in MB per second) that can be transported past the external memory interface within a second. It is calculated by multiplying the bus width by its memory clock speed. In the case of DDR type memory, it must be multiplied by 2 again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The better the 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 figure is calculated by multiplying the total number of texture units of the card by the core clock speed of the chip. The higher this number, the better the graphics 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 maximum number of pixels that the graphics card could possibly record to the local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is calculated by multiplying the amount of ROPs by the clock speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also called Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel fill rate also depends on quite a few other factors, especially the memory bandwidth - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to get to the max fill rate.