Radeon R7 250 vs Radeon R9 M290X

Intro

Compare those specifications to the Radeon R9 M290X, which features GPU clock speed of 850 MHz, and 4096 MB of GDDR5 memory set to run at 1200 MHz through a 256-bit bus. It also is comprised of 1280 SPUs, 80 Texture Address Units, and 32 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon R7 250		65 Watts
Radeon R9 M290X		100 Watts
	Difference: 35 Watts (54%)

Memory Bandwidth

In theory, the Radeon R9 M290X should perform much faster than the Radeon R7 250 overall. (explain)

Radeon R9 M290X		153600 MB/sec
Radeon R7 250		73600 MB/sec
	Difference: 80000 (109%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon R9 M290X should be quite a bit (more or less 183%) better at anisotropic filtering than the Radeon R7 250. (explain)

Radeon R9 M290X		68000 Mtexels/sec
Radeon R7 250		24000 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 44000 (183%)

Pixel Rate

If running with high levels of AA is important to you, then the Radeon R9 M290X is the winner, and very much so. (explain)

Radeon R9 M290X		27200 Mpixels/sec
Radeon R7 250		8000 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 19200 (240%)

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 (measured in megabytes per second) that can be transported across the external memory interface within a second. The number is worked out by multiplying the bus width by its memory clock speed. In the case of DDR RAM, it should be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The better the memory bandwidth, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, HDR and high resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum number of texture map elements (texels) that are applied per second. This is worked out by multiplying the total number of texture units of the card by the core speed of the chip. The better this number, the better the video card will be at 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 the graphics card could possibly record to its local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is calculated by multiplying the number 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 filling the screen with pixels (the image). The actual pixel output rate is also dependant on many other factors, especially the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the ability to get to the maximum fill rate.