Radeon HD 7850 vs Radeon R9 M390X

Intro

Compare those specifications to the Radeon R9 M390X, which features a clock speed of 723 MHz and a GDDR5 memory speed of 1250 MHz. It also uses a 256-bit memory bus, and uses a 28 nm design. It 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 M390X		125 Watts
Radeon HD 7850		130 Watts
	Difference: 5 Watts (4%)

Memory Bandwidth

Performance-wise, the Radeon R9 M390X should in theory be a small bit better than the Radeon HD 7850 overall. (explain)

Radeon R9 M390X		160000 MB/sec
Radeon HD 7850		153600 MB/sec
	Difference: 6400 (4%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon R9 M390X should be a lot (more or less 68%) better at anisotropic filtering than the Radeon HD 7850. (explain)

Radeon R9 M390X		92544 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 7850		55040 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 37504 (68%)

Pixel Rate

If running with lots of anti-aliasing is important to you, then the Radeon HD 7850 is the winner, but it probably won't make a huge difference. (explain)

Radeon HD 7850		27520 Mpixels/sec
Radeon R9 M390X		23136 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 4384 (19%)

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 (measured in megabytes per second) that can be transferred past the external memory interface within a second. It is worked out by multiplying the card's interface width by the speed of its memory. If it uses DDR RAM, it must be multiplied by 2 once again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher the card's memory bandwidth, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, HDR and high resolutions.

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

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum amount of pixels that the graphics chip can possibly record to the local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is worked out by multiplying the amount of Raster Operations Pipelines by the the core speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also called Render Output Units) are responsible for drawing the pixels (image) on the screen. The actual pixel rate also depends on lots of other factors, especially the memory bandwidth - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the ability to reach the maximum fill rate.