Radeon HD 7950 vs Radeon R9 M290X

Intro

Compare those specs to the Radeon R9 M290X, which comes with a core clock speed of 850 MHz and a GDDR5 memory frequency of 1200 MHz. It also uses a 256-bit bus, and uses a 28 nm design. It is made up 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 R9 M290X		100 Watts
Radeon HD 7950		200 Watts
	Difference: 100 Watts (100%)

Memory Bandwidth

The Radeon HD 7950 should in theory be a lot faster than the Radeon R9 M290X in general. (explain)

Radeon HD 7950		240000 MB/sec
Radeon R9 M290X		153600 MB/sec
	Difference: 86400 (56%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 7950 is a lot (about 32%) more effective at texture filtering than the Radeon R9 M290X. (explain)

Radeon HD 7950		89600 Mtexels/sec
Radeon R9 M290X		68000 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 21600 (32%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon R9 M290X should be a bit (approximately 6%) more effective at AA than the Radeon HD 7950, and should be able to handle higher resolutions without slowing down too much. (explain)

Radeon R9 M290X		27200 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 7950		25600 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 1600 (6%)

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 largest amount of information (in units of MB per second) that can be moved over the external memory interface within a second. It is worked out by multiplying the interface width by the speed of its memory. If it uses DDR RAM, it should be multiplied by 2 again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The better the 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 texture map elements (texels) that are processed per second. This is worked out by multiplying the total amount of texture units by the core speed of the chip. The higher the texel rate, the better the graphics card will be at handling texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels per second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum amount of pixels that the graphics chip can possibly write to the local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is worked out by multiplying the amount of colour ROPs by the the card's clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also sometimes called Render Output Units) are responsible for filling the screen with pixels (the image). The actual pixel rate is also dependant on many other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to get to the maximum fill rate.