Radeon HD 7970 vs Radeon R9 M290X

Intro

Compare all that to the Radeon R9 M290X, which features clock 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 Texture Address Units and 32 Rasterization Operator Units.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon R9 M290X		100 Watts
Radeon HD 7970		250 Watts
	Difference: 150 Watts (150%)

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically, the Radeon HD 7970 should perform quite a bit faster than the Radeon R9 M290X in general. (explain)

Radeon HD 7970		264000 MB/sec
Radeon R9 M290X		153600 MB/sec
	Difference: 110400 (72%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 7970 will be much (more or less 74%) better at AF than the Radeon R9 M290X. (explain)

Radeon HD 7970		118400 Mtexels/sec
Radeon R9 M290X		68000 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 50400 (74%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon HD 7970 should be a little bit (more or less 9%) better at FSAA than the Radeon R9 M290X, and also will be capable of handling higher resolutions without slowing down too much. (explain)

Radeon HD 7970		29600 Mpixels/sec
Radeon R9 M290X		27200 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 2400 (9%)

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 MB per second) that can be transferred across the external memory interface in a second. It is worked out by multiplying the card's interface width by the speed of its memory. If it uses DDR memory, it should be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The higher 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 texture map elements (texels) that can be applied in one second. This figure is calculated by multiplying the total number of texture units of the card by the core clock speed of the chip. The higher the texel rate, the better the video card will be at handling texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels applied in a second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum number of pixels that the graphics chip could possibly record to the local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure 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 filling the screen with pixels (the image). The actual pixel rate is also dependant on quite a few other factors, especially the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the ability to get to the maximum fill rate.