Radeon HD 4790 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 makes use of a 256-bit memory bus, and uses a 28 nm design. It is comprised of 1280 SPUs, 80 Texture Address Units, and 32 Raster Operation Units.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Memory Bandwidth

The Radeon R9 M290X should in theory perform a lot faster than the Radeon HD 4790 overall. (explain)

Radeon R9 M290X		153600 MB/sec
Radeon HD 4790		102400 MB/sec
	Difference: 51200 (50%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon R9 M290X will be a lot (approximately 254%) faster with regards to texture filtering than the Radeon HD 4790. (explain)

Radeon R9 M290X		68000 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 4790		19200 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 48800 (254%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon R9 M290X is much (approximately 183%) better at FSAA than the Radeon HD 4790, and also should be capable of handling higher resolutions more effectively. (explain)

Radeon R9 M290X		27200 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 4790		9600 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 17600 (183%)

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 max amount of information (measured in MB per second) that can be moved across the external memory interface in a second. The number is worked out by multiplying the card's bus width by its memory clock speed. If it uses DDR type RAM, the result should be multiplied by 2 again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher the memory bandwidth, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, High Dynamic Range and high resolutions.

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

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum amount of pixels that the graphics chip can possibly record to its local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is worked out by multiplying the number of Raster Operations Pipelines by the the core clock speed. 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 output rate also depends on many other factors, especially the memory bandwidth - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to reach the max fill rate.