Radeon HD 7970 vs Radeon R9 M295X

Intro

Compare those specs to the Radeon R9 M295X, which makes use of a 28 nm design. AMD has clocked the core speed at 750 MHz. The GDDR5 memory works at a frequency of 1375 MHz on this particular card. It features 2048 SPUs as well as 128 Texture Address Units and 32 Rasterization Operator Units.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon R9 M295X		125 Watts
Radeon HD 7970		250 Watts
	Difference: 125 Watts (100%)

Memory Bandwidth

In theory, the Radeon HD 7970 is 50% faster than the Radeon R9 M295X overall, due to its greater bandwidth. (explain)

Radeon HD 7970		264000 MB/sec
Radeon R9 M295X		176000 MB/sec
	Difference: 88000 (50%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 7970 will be much (about 23%) faster with regards to texture filtering than the Radeon R9 M295X. (explain)

Radeon HD 7970		118400 Mtexels/sec
Radeon R9 M295X		96000 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 22400 (23%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon HD 7970 should be much (approximately 23%) better at AA than the Radeon R9 M295X, and also capable of handling higher resolutions without losing too much performance. (explain)

Radeon HD 7970		29600 Mpixels/sec
Radeon R9 M295X		24000 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 5600 (23%)

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 data (measured in MB per second) that can be transferred across the external memory interface within a second. It's worked out by multiplying the bus width by its memory clock speed. If it uses DDR type RAM, the result should be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher the memory bandwidth, the faster 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 in one second. This is worked out by multiplying the total amount of texture units by the core clock speed of the chip. The better the texel rate, the better the video card will be at texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels processed per second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels that the graphics card can possibly record to its local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is worked out by multiplying the amount of Raster Operations Pipelines by the the core clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also sometimes called Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel output rate is also dependant on quite a few other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to get to the max fill rate.