Radeon HD 6970 vs Radeon R9 M290X

Intro

Compare those specifications to the Radeon R9 M290X, which uses a 28 nm design. AMD has clocked the core frequency at 850 MHz. The GDDR5 memory works at a frequency of 1200 MHz on this model. It features 1280 SPUs along with 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 6970		250 Watts
	Difference: 150 Watts (150%)

Memory Bandwidth

The Radeon HD 6970 should theoretically be a small bit faster than the Radeon R9 M290X overall. (explain)

Radeon HD 6970		176000 MB/sec
Radeon R9 M290X		153600 MB/sec
	Difference: 22400 (15%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 6970 should be much (about 24%) better at anisotropic filtering than the Radeon R9 M290X. (explain)

Radeon HD 6970		84480 Mtexels/sec
Radeon R9 M290X		68000 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 16480 (24%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon HD 6970 should be just a bit (more or less 4%) faster with regards to FSAA than the Radeon R9 M290X, and also will be capable of handling higher resolutions without losing too much performance. (explain)

Radeon HD 6970		28160 Mpixels/sec
Radeon R9 M290X		27200 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 960 (4%)

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 past the external memory interface in one second. It's worked out by multiplying the card's bus width by its memory clock speed. If it uses DDR RAM, it should be multiplied by 2 once again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The higher the card's 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 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 texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels applied in a second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels the video card can possibly write to the local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is worked out by multiplying the amount of ROPs by the clock speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - sometimes also referred to as Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. 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 ability to get to the maximum fill rate.