Radeon R9 280 vs Radeon R9 M395X

Intro

The Radeon R9 280 makes use of a 28 nm design. AMD has clocked the core frequency at 933 MHz. The GDDR5 memory is set to run at a frequency of 1250 MHz on this specific card. It features 1792 SPUs as well as 112 Texture Address Units and 32 Rasterization Operator Units.

Compare all that to the Radeon R9 M395X, which comes with GPU clock speed of 723 MHz, and 4096 MB of GDDR5 memory set to run at 1250 MHz through a 256-bit bus. It also is comprised of 2048 SPUs, 128 Texture Address Units, and 32 ROPs.

Price Comparison

Specifications

Memory Bandwidth: Bandwidth is the maximum amount of information (measured in MB per second) that can be transported across the external memory interface within a second. It's worked out by multiplying the bus width by the speed of its memory. If it uses DDR memory, the result should be multiplied by 2 once again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The better the card's memory bandwidth, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, HDR and higher screen resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum amount of texture map elements (texels) that can be applied in one second. This number is calculated by multiplying the total number of texture units of the card by the core 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 number of pixels that the graphics chip can possibly write to its local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is calculated by multiplying the amount of ROPs by the the core clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - aka Render Output Units) are responsible for filling the screen with pixels (the image). The actual pixel rate also depends on many other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the potential to reach the max fill rate.