Radeon R9 380 2G vs Radeon R9 M290X

Intro

Compare that to the Radeon R9 M290X, which uses a 28 nm design. AMD has set the core speed at 850 MHz. The GDDR5 RAM works at a speed of 1200 MHz on this specific model. 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 380 2G		190 Watts
	Difference: 90 Watts (90%)

Memory Bandwidth

As far as performance goes, the Radeon R9 380 2G should theoretically be a bit superior to the Radeon R9 M290X overall. (explain)

Radeon R9 380 2G		182400 MB/sec
Radeon R9 M290X		153600 MB/sec
	Difference: 28800 (19%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon R9 380 2G is quite a bit (about 60%) better at anisotropic filtering than the Radeon R9 M290X. (explain)

Radeon R9 380 2G		108640 Mtexels/sec
Radeon R9 M290X		68000 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 40640 (60%)

Pixel Rate

If using lots of anti-aliasing is important to you, then the Radeon R9 380 2G is a better choice, but only just. (explain)

Radeon R9 380 2G		31040 Mpixels/sec
Radeon R9 M290X		27200 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 3840 (14%)

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 data (counted in megabytes per second) that can be transported over the external memory interface within a second. It is worked out by multiplying the card's bus width by its memory clock speed. If the card has DDR RAM, it should be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The higher the bandwidth is, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, HDR and higher screen resolutions.

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

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum amount of pixels that the graphics card can possibly record to the local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is calculated by multiplying the number of colour ROPs by the the card's clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also called Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel output rate also depends on many other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to reach the maximum fill rate.