Radeon R9 M280X vs Radeon R9 M290X

Intro

Compare all of that to the Radeon R9 M290X, which comes with core clock speeds of 850 MHz on the GPU, and 1200 MHz on the 4096 MB of GDDR5 RAM. It features 1280 SPUs along with 80 TAUs and 32 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon R9 M280X		75 Watts
Radeon R9 M290X		100 Watts
	Difference: 25 Watts (33%)

Memory Bandwidth

Performance-wise, the Radeon R9 M290X should in theory be much superior to the Radeon R9 M280X overall. (explain)

Radeon R9 M290X		153600 MB/sec
Radeon R9 M280X		88000 MB/sec
	Difference: 65600 (75%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon R9 M290X should be much (more or less 35%) better at AF than the Radeon R9 M280X. (explain)

Radeon R9 M290X		68000 Mtexels/sec
Radeon R9 M280X		50400 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 17600 (35%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon R9 M290X is quite a bit (more or less 89%) better at FSAA than the Radeon R9 M280X, and able to handle higher screen resolutions without losing too much performance. (explain)

Radeon R9 M290X		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 largest amount of information (measured in megabytes per second) that can be transferred across the external memory interface within a second. It is worked out by multiplying the interface width by the speed of its memory. If it uses DDR RAM, it should be multiplied by 2 once again. If DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The better the 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 are applied per second. This number is calculated by multiplying the total amount of texture units of the card by the core 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 applied per second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum number of pixels that the graphics 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 amount of colour ROPs by the clock speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also sometimes called Render Output Units) are responsible for filling the screen with pixels (the image). The actual pixel rate also depends on quite a few other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the potential to reach the maximum fill rate.