Radeon HD 6970 vs Radeon R9 M275X

Intro

Compare all that to the Radeon R9 M275X, which uses a 28 nm design. AMD has clocked the core frequency at 900 MHz. The GDDR5 RAM is set to run at a frequency of 1125 MHz on this specific model. It features 640 SPUs along with 40 Texture Address Units and 16 Rasterization Operator Units.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon R9 M275X		50 Watts
Radeon HD 6970		250 Watts
	Difference: 200 Watts (400%)

Memory Bandwidth

The Radeon HD 6970, in theory, should be much faster than the Radeon R9 M275X overall. (explain)

Radeon HD 6970		176000 MB/sec
Radeon R9 M275X		72000 MB/sec
	Difference: 104000 (144%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 6970 should be much (about 135%) more effective at texture filtering than the Radeon R9 M275X. (explain)

Radeon HD 6970		84480 Mtexels/sec
Radeon R9 M275X		36000 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 48480 (135%)

Pixel Rate

If running with high levels of AA is important to you, then the Radeon HD 6970 is superior to the Radeon R9 M275X, and very much so. (explain)

Radeon HD 6970		28160 Mpixels/sec
Radeon R9 M275X		14400 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 13760 (96%)

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 max amount of information (measured in megabytes per second) that can be moved past the external memory interface in a second. It's worked out by multiplying the card's bus width by its memory speed. In the case of DDR type memory, it must be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The better the bandwidth is, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, HDR and higher screen resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum number of texture map elements (texels) that are applied per second. This is calculated by multiplying the total texture units of the card by the core clock 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 applied in one 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. Pixel rate is worked out by multiplying the number of Render Output Units by the the card's clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also sometimes called Render Output Units) are responsible for filling the screen with pixels (the image). The actual pixel rate is also dependant on many other factors, especially the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the ability to get to the max fill rate.