Radeon R7 M260 vs Radeon R9 290

Intro

Compare those specifications to the Radeon R9 290, which makes use of a 28 nm design. AMD has set the core speed at 800 MHz. The GDDR5 memory is set to run at a speed of 1250 MHz on this model. It features 2560 SPUs along with 160 Texture Address Units and 64 Rasterization Operator Units.

Display Graphs

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Benchmarks

These are real-world performance benchmarks that were submitted by Hardware Compare users. The scores seen here are the average of all benchmarks submitted for each respective test and hardware.

3DMark Fire Strike Graphics Score

Radeon R9 290		9876 points
Radeon R7 M260		1120 points
	Difference: 8756 (782%)

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically speaking, the Radeon R9 290 will be 1900% faster than the Radeon R7 M260 overall, due to its higher data rate. (explain)

Radeon R9 290		320000 MB/sec
Radeon R7 M260		16000 MB/sec
	Difference: 304000 (1900%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon R9 290 is a lot (approximately 646%) better at anisotropic filtering than the Radeon R7 M260. (explain)

Radeon R9 290		128000 Mtexels/sec
Radeon R7 M260		17160 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 110840 (646%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon R9 290 will be a lot (about 795%) better at anti-aliasing than the Radeon R7 M260, and also should be capable of handling higher resolutions without slowing down too much. (explain)

Radeon R9 290		51200 Mpixels/sec
Radeon R7 M260		5720 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 45480 (795%)

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 information (counted in MB per second) that can be transferred over the external memory interface in one second. It's worked out by multiplying the card's bus width by its memory clock speed. If it uses DDR type RAM, it must be multiplied by 2 once again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The better the bandwidth is, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, High Dynamic Range and high resolutions.

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

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum amount of pixels that the graphics card can possibly record to the local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is worked out by multiplying the number of Render Output Units 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 quite a few other factors, especially the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the ability to reach the max fill rate.