Radeon HD 5970 vs Radeon R9 M290X

Intro

Compare all of that to the Radeon R9 M290X, which has GPU clock speed of 850 MHz, and 4096 MB of GDDR5 RAM running at 1200 MHz through a 256-bit bus. It also features 1280 SPUs, 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 5970		294 Watts
	Difference: 194 Watts (194%)

Memory Bandwidth

In theory, the Radeon HD 5970 should be a lot faster than the Radeon R9 M290X in general. (explain)

Radeon HD 5970		256000 MB/sec
Radeon R9 M290X		153600 MB/sec
	Difference: 102400 (67%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 5970 is much (more or less 241%) more effective at AF than the Radeon R9 M290X. (explain)

Radeon HD 5970		232000 Mtexels/sec
Radeon R9 M290X		68000 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 164000 (241%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon HD 5970 is quite a bit (approximately 241%) more effective at FSAA than the Radeon R9 M290X, and also able to handle higher resolutions without slowing down too much. (explain)

Radeon HD 5970		92800 Mpixels/sec
Radeon R9 M290X		27200 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 65600 (241%)

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 (counted in megabytes per second) that can be transferred across the external memory interface in a second. The number is worked out by multiplying the interface width by its memory clock speed. In the case of DDR memory, it must be multiplied by 2 once again. If DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The higher the memory bandwidth, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, HDR and higher screen resolutions.

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

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum amount of pixels that the graphics chip can possibly write to its local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is calculated by multiplying the number of Render Output Units by the the core clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also called Render Output Units) are responsible for drawing the pixels (image) on the screen. The actual pixel fill rate is also dependant on lots of other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to reach the maximum fill rate.