Radeon R9 290 vs Radeon R9 M380

Intro

Compare those specs to the Radeon R9 M380, which comes with core clock speeds of 1000 MHz on the GPU, and 1500 MHz on the 4096 MB of GDDR5 memory. It features 640 SPUs along with 40 Texture Address Units and 16 Rasterization Operator Units.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically, the Radeon R9 290 should perform a lot faster than the Radeon R9 M380 overall. (explain)

Radeon R9 290		320000 MB/sec
Radeon R9 M380		96000 MB/sec
	Difference: 224000 (233%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon R9 290 will be a lot (approximately 220%) faster with regards to anisotropic filtering than the Radeon R9 M380. (explain)

Radeon R9 290		128000 Mtexels/sec
Radeon R9 M380		40000 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 88000 (220%)

Pixel Rate

If running with lots of anti-aliasing is important to you, then the Radeon R9 290 is the winner, by far. (explain)

Radeon R9 290		51200 Mpixels/sec
Radeon R9 M380		16000 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 35200 (220%)

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 (in units of megabytes per second) that can be transferred across the external memory interface in one second. It is calculated by multiplying the interface width by its memory clock speed. In the case of 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 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 texture map elements (texels) that are applied per second. This is worked out by multiplying the total number of texture units of the card by the core speed of the chip. The higher 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 number of pixels the graphics card could possibly write to the local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is calculated by multiplying the amount of Render Output Units by the the core 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 also depends on many other factors, especially the memory bandwidth - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the ability to reach the max fill rate.