Radeon HD 6990 vs Radeon R9 M290X

Intro

Compare that to the Radeon R9 M290X, which makes use of a 28 nm design. AMD has set the core frequency at 850 MHz. The GDDR5 memory runs at a frequency of 1200 MHz on this card. It features 1280 SPUs as well as 80 TAUs and 32 Rasterization Operator Units.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon R9 M290X		100 Watts
Radeon HD 6990		375 Watts
	Difference: 275 Watts (275%)

Memory Bandwidth

The Radeon HD 6990, in theory, should be a lot faster than the Radeon R9 M290X in general. (explain)

Radeon HD 6990		320000 MB/sec
Radeon R9 M290X		153600 MB/sec
	Difference: 166400 (108%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 6990 should be a lot (more or less 134%) more effective at texture filtering than the Radeon R9 M290X. (explain)

Radeon HD 6990		159360 Mtexels/sec
Radeon R9 M290X		68000 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 91360 (134%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon HD 6990 should be much (approximately 95%) faster with regards to full screen anti-aliasing than the Radeon R9 M290X, and should be able to handle higher resolutions while still performing well. (explain)

Radeon HD 6990		53120 Mpixels/sec
Radeon R9 M290X		27200 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 25920 (95%)

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.

One or more cards in this comparison are multi-core. This means that their bandwidth, texel and pixel rates are theoretically doubled - this does not mean the card will actually perform twice as fast, but only that it should in theory be able to. Actual game benchmarks will give a more accurate idea of what it's capable of.

Price Comparison

Specifications

Memory Bandwidth: Bandwidth is the largest amount of data (measured in MB per second) that can be transported past the external memory interface in a second. It is calculated by multiplying the bus width by the speed of its memory. If it uses DDR RAM, it must be multiplied by 2 once again. If DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The higher the bandwidth is, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, HDR and high resolutions.

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

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