Radeon HD 7850 vs Radeon R9 M290X

Intro

Compare those specs 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 TAUs and 32 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon R9 M290X		100 Watts
Radeon HD 7850		130 Watts
	Difference: 30 Watts (30%)

Memory Bandwidth

Both cards have exactly the same bandwidth, so theoretically they should have the same performance. (explain)

Texel Rate

The Radeon R9 M290X will be much (about 24%) better at AF than the Radeon HD 7850. (explain)

Radeon R9 M290X		68000 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 7850		55040 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 12960 (24%)

Pixel Rate

If running with a high resolution is important to you, then the Radeon HD 7850 is the winner, but it probably won't make a huge difference. (explain)

Radeon HD 7850		27520 Mpixels/sec
Radeon R9 M290X		27200 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 320 (1%)

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 (counted in MB per second) that can be moved across the external memory interface within a second. It's worked out by multiplying the card's interface width by its memory speed. If it uses DDR memory, it should be multiplied by 2 again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The better the card's memory bandwidth, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, High Dynamic Range and high resolutions.

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

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum amount of pixels the video card could possibly record to its local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is calculated by multiplying the amount of Raster Operations Pipelines by the the card's clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also sometimes called Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel output rate also depends on quite a few other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the ability to get to the maximum fill rate.