Radeon HD 5870 vs Radeon R9 M280X

Intro

Compare all that to the Radeon R9 M280X, which uses a 28 nm design. AMD has clocked the core speed at 900 MHz. The GDDR5 RAM runs at a speed of 1375 MHz on this model. It features 896 SPUs as well as 56 TAUs and 16 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon R9 M280X		75 Watts
Radeon HD 5870		188 Watts
	Difference: 113 Watts (151%)

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically speaking, the Radeon HD 5870 will be 75% faster than the Radeon R9 M280X overall, because of its higher bandwidth. (explain)

Radeon HD 5870		153600 MB/sec
Radeon R9 M280X		88000 MB/sec
	Difference: 65600 (75%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 5870 will be a lot (more or less 35%) more effective at anisotropic filtering than the Radeon R9 M280X. (explain)

Radeon HD 5870		68000 Mtexels/sec
Radeon R9 M280X		50400 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 17600 (35%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon HD 5870 is much (more or less 89%) faster with regards to AA than the Radeon R9 M280X, and also will be capable of handling higher resolutions without losing too much performance. (explain)

Radeon HD 5870		27200 Mpixels/sec
Radeon R9 M280X		14400 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 12800 (89%)

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 over the external memory interface within a second. It is calculated by multiplying the interface width by its memory clock speed. If it uses DDR memory, it should be multiplied by 2 once again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher the bandwidth is, 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 applied per second. This number is worked out by multiplying the total number of texture units by the core speed of the chip. The better the texel rate, 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 amount of pixels that the graphics card can possibly write to its local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is calculated by multiplying the amount of Raster Operations Pipelines by the the core clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also called Render Output Units) are responsible for filling the screen with pixels (the image). The actual pixel rate also depends on many other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the potential to get to the maximum fill rate.