Radeon HD 5870 vs Radeon R9 M295X

Intro

Compare that to the Radeon R9 M295X, which has a GPU core clock speed of 750 MHz, and 4096 MB of GDDR5 RAM set to run at 1375 MHz through a 256-bit bus. It also features 2048 SPUs, 128 TAUs, and 32 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon R9 M295X		125 Watts
Radeon HD 5870		188 Watts
	Difference: 63 Watts (50%)

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically, the Radeon R9 M295X should be a bit faster than the Radeon HD 5870 in general. (explain)

Radeon R9 M295X		176000 MB/sec
Radeon HD 5870		153600 MB/sec
	Difference: 22400 (15%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon R9 M295X should be quite a bit (about 41%) more effective at anisotropic filtering than the Radeon HD 5870. (explain)

Radeon R9 M295X		96000 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 5870		68000 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 28000 (41%)

Pixel Rate

If using lots of anti-aliasing is important to you, then the Radeon HD 5870 is superior to the Radeon R9 M295X, not by a very large margin though. (explain)

Radeon HD 5870		27200 Mpixels/sec
Radeon R9 M295X		24000 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 3200 (13%)

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: Bandwidth is the max amount of data (in units of megabytes per second) that can be transferred across the external memory interface in a second. It is worked out by multiplying the bus width by the speed of its memory. In the case of DDR RAM, the result should be multiplied by 2 once again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher the bandwidth is, 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 number of texture map elements (texels) that are applied per second. This is calculated by multiplying the total amount of texture units of the card by the core clock speed of the chip. The better the texel rate, the better the card will be at handling texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels processed per second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum amount of pixels that the graphics chip could possibly write to the local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is worked out by multiplying the amount of Render Output Units 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 rate also depends on lots of other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to get to the max fill rate.