Radeon HD 6990 vs Radeon R9 M280X

Intro

Compare those specs to the Radeon R9 M280X, which makes use of a 28 nm design. AMD has clocked the core frequency at 900 MHz. The GDDR5 RAM works at a speed of 1375 MHz on this specific card. It features 896 SPUs as well as 56 Texture Address Units and 16 Rasterization Operator Units.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon R9 M280X		75 Watts
Radeon HD 6990		375 Watts
	Difference: 300 Watts (400%)

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically, the Radeon HD 6990 should be much faster than the Radeon R9 M280X in general. (explain)

Radeon HD 6990		320000 MB/sec
Radeon R9 M280X		88000 MB/sec
	Difference: 232000 (264%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 6990 will be a lot (more or less 216%) better at texture filtering than the Radeon R9 M280X. (explain)

Radeon HD 6990		159360 Mtexels/sec
Radeon R9 M280X		50400 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 108960 (216%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon HD 6990 should be a lot (about 269%) better at anti-aliasing than the Radeon R9 M280X, and should be able to handle higher screen resolutions more effectively. (explain)

Radeon HD 6990		53120 Mpixels/sec
Radeon R9 M280X		14400 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 38720 (269%)

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.

One or more cards in this comparison are multi-core. This means that their bandwidth, texel and pixel rates are theoretically doubled - this does not mean the card will actually perform twice as fast, but only that it should in theory be able to. Actual game benchmarks will give a more accurate idea of what it's capable of.

Price Comparison

Specifications

Memory Bandwidth: Bandwidth is the max amount of information (measured in MB per second) that can be moved 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, it must 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 anti-aliasing, High Dynamic Range and higher screen resolutions.

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

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum number of pixels that the graphics card could possibly record to the 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 - sometimes also referred to as Render Output Units) are responsible for filling the screen with pixels (the image). The actual pixel output rate also depends on lots of other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the ability to reach the max fill rate.