Radeon R9 390X 8G vs Radeon R9 M290X

Intro

Compare that to the Radeon R9 M290X, which has core speeds of 850 MHz on the GPU, and 1200 MHz on the 4096 MB of GDDR5 RAM. It features 1280 SPUs as well as 80 Texture Address Units and 32 ROPs.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon R9 M290X		100 Watts
Radeon R9 390X 8G		275 Watts
	Difference: 175 Watts (175%)

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically speaking, the Radeon R9 390X 8G should be 150% faster than the Radeon R9 M290X overall, because of its higher bandwidth. (explain)

Radeon R9 390X 8G		384000 MB/sec
Radeon R9 M290X		153600 MB/sec
	Difference: 230400 (150%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon R9 390X 8G is much (about 172%) faster with regards to anisotropic filtering than the Radeon R9 M290X. (explain)

Radeon R9 390X 8G		184800 Mtexels/sec
Radeon R9 M290X		68000 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 116800 (172%)

Pixel Rate

If running with a high screen resolution is important to you, then the Radeon R9 390X 8G is a better choice, and very much so. (explain)

Radeon R9 390X 8G		67200 Mpixels/sec
Radeon R9 M290X		27200 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 40000 (147%)

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 max amount of information (counted in MB per second) that can be moved past the external memory interface within a second. It is calculated by multiplying the card's interface width by its memory clock speed. In the case of DDR RAM, it must be multiplied by 2 once again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The better the bandwidth is, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, HDR and higher screen resolutions.

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

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels that the graphics chip can possibly record to the local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is calculated by multiplying the amount 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 outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel fill rate also depends on many other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the ability to get to the maximum fill rate.