Radeon R9 280 vs Radeon R9 M290X

Intro

Compare those specifications 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 memory. It features 1280 SPUs along with 80 Texture Address Units and 32 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon R9 M290X		100 Watts
Radeon R9 280		250 Watts
	Difference: 150 Watts (150%)

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically speaking, the Radeon R9 280 should be 56% quicker than the Radeon R9 M290X in general, due to its higher data rate. (explain)

Radeon R9 280		240000 MB/sec
Radeon R9 M290X		153600 MB/sec
	Difference: 86400 (56%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon R9 280 will be a lot (more or less 54%) better at AF than the Radeon R9 M290X. (explain)

Radeon R9 280		104496 Mtexels/sec
Radeon R9 M290X		68000 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 36496 (54%)

Pixel Rate

If using lots of anti-aliasing is important to you, then the Radeon R9 280 is superior to the Radeon R9 M290X, but it probably won't make a huge difference. (explain)

Radeon R9 280		29856 Mpixels/sec
Radeon R9 M290X		27200 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 2656 (10%)

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: Bandwidth is the max amount of information (counted in megabytes per second) that can be transported across the external memory interface in a second. It's calculated by multiplying the card's bus width by its memory speed. In the case of DDR memory, it must be multiplied by 2 again. If DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The better the memory bandwidth, the faster 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 can be processed per second. This is calculated by multiplying the total number of texture units by the core clock speed of the chip. The higher this number, the better the 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 chip could possibly write to the local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is worked out by multiplying the amount of Raster Operations Pipelines by the the core 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 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.