Radeon R9 M290X vs Radeon RX 480

Intro

Compare all that to the Radeon RX 480, which uses a 14 nm design. AMD has clocked the core speed at 1120 MHz. The GDDR5 memory runs at a speed of 2000 MHz on this specific model. It features 2304 SPUs along with 144 TAUs and 32 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon R9 M290X		100 Watts
Radeon RX 480		150 Watts
	Difference: 50 Watts (50%)

Memory Bandwidth

The Radeon RX 480 should theoretically be much faster than the Radeon R9 M290X overall. (explain)

Radeon RX 480		262144 MB/sec
Radeon R9 M290X		153600 MB/sec
	Difference: 108544 (71%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon RX 480 is a lot (about 137%) more effective at anisotropic filtering than the Radeon R9 M290X. (explain)

Radeon RX 480		161280 Mtexels/sec
Radeon R9 M290X		68000 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 93280 (137%)

Pixel Rate

If running with high levels of AA is important to you, then the Radeon RX 480 is superior to the Radeon R9 M290X, by far. (explain)

Radeon RX 480		35840 Mpixels/sec
Radeon R9 M290X		27200 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 8640 (32%)

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 maximum amount of information (measured in megabytes per second) that can be transferred over the external memory interface in a second. The number is calculated 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 it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The better the memory bandwidth, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, High Dynamic Range and high resolutions.

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

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum amount of pixels the video card can possibly record to its local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is calculated by multiplying the amount of ROPs by the clock 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 output rate is also dependant on quite a few other factors, especially the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the potential to reach the max fill rate.