Radeon HD 7970 vs Radeon R9 M395X

Intro

Compare those specs to the Radeon R9 M395X, which makes use of a 28 nm design. AMD has clocked the core frequency at 723 MHz. The GDDR5 memory runs at a speed of 1250 MHz on this card. It features 2048 SPUs along with 128 TAUs and 32 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon R9 M395X		125 Watts
Radeon HD 7970		250 Watts
	Difference: 125 Watts (100%)

Memory Bandwidth

As far as performance goes, the Radeon HD 7970 should theoretically be much superior to the Radeon R9 M395X in general. (explain)

Radeon HD 7970		264000 MB/sec
Radeon R9 M395X		160000 MB/sec
	Difference: 104000 (65%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 7970 is much (about 28%) faster with regards to AF than the Radeon R9 M395X. (explain)

Radeon HD 7970		118400 Mtexels/sec
Radeon R9 M395X		92544 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 25856 (28%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon HD 7970 will be a lot (approximately 28%) better at FSAA than the Radeon R9 M395X, and also should be capable of handling higher resolutions without slowing down too much. (explain)

Radeon HD 7970		29600 Mpixels/sec
Radeon R9 M395X		23136 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 6464 (28%)

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 maximum amount of data (in units of MB per second) that can be transferred past the external memory interface in a second. The number is worked out by multiplying the bus width by its memory speed. If the card has DDR memory, it must 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 anti-aliasing, High Dynamic Range and higher screen resolutions.

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

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels that the graphics chip could possibly write to its local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is worked out by multiplying the amount of Render Output Units by the clock speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also sometimes called Render Output Units) are responsible for filling the screen with pixels (the image). The actual pixel rate also depends on lots of other factors, especially the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to get to the max fill rate.