Radeon R7 250X vs Radeon R9 M280X

Intro

Compare all that to the Radeon R9 M280X, which comes with GPU core speed of 900 MHz, and 4096 MB of GDDR5 RAM running at 1375 MHz through a 128-bit bus. It also is made up of 896 SPUs, 56 Texture Address Units, and 16 ROPs.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon R9 M280X		75 Watts
Radeon R7 250X		95 Watts
	Difference: 20 Watts (27%)

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically, the Radeon R9 M280X should perform quite a bit faster than the Radeon R7 250X overall. (explain)

Radeon R9 M280X		88000 MB/sec
Radeon R7 250X		72000 MB/sec
	Difference: 16000 (22%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon R9 M280X will be much (about 26%) better at texture filtering than the Radeon R7 250X. (explain)

Radeon R9 M280X		50400 Mtexels/sec
Radeon R7 250X		40000 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 10400 (26%)

Pixel Rate

If running with lots of anti-aliasing is important to you, then the Radeon R7 250X is the winner, though not by far. (explain)

Radeon R7 250X		16000 Mpixels/sec
Radeon R9 M280X		14400 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 1600 (11%)

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 information (measured in megabytes per second) that can be moved over the external memory interface in one second. The number is worked out by multiplying the bus width by the speed of its memory. In the case of DDR RAM, it should be multiplied by 2 once again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher 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 amount of texture map elements (texels) that are applied in one second. This figure is worked out by multiplying the total amount of texture units of the card by the core speed of the chip. The higher this number, the better the graphics card will be at texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels in a second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum number of pixels that the graphics chip can possibly record to its local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is worked out by multiplying the amount of ROPs by the the core clock speed. 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 fill rate is also dependant on many other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the ability to get to the maximum fill rate.