Radeon HD 7870 XT vs Radeon R9 M280X

Intro

Compare those specs to the Radeon R9 M280X, which features core clock speeds of 900 MHz on the GPU, and 1375 MHz on the 4096 MB of GDDR5 memory. It features 896 SPUs along with 56 Texture Address Units and 16 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon R9 M280X		75 Watts
Radeon HD 7870 XT		185 Watts
	Difference: 110 Watts (147%)

Memory Bandwidth

As far as performance goes, the Radeon HD 7870 XT should in theory be quite a bit superior to the Radeon R9 M280X in general. (explain)

Radeon HD 7870 XT		192000 MB/sec
Radeon R9 M280X		88000 MB/sec
	Difference: 104000 (118%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 7870 XT is quite a bit (approximately 76%) better at anisotropic filtering than the Radeon R9 M280X. (explain)

Radeon HD 7870 XT		88800 Mtexels/sec
Radeon R9 M280X		50400 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 38400 (76%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon HD 7870 XT is much (approximately 106%) more effective at FSAA than the Radeon R9 M280X, and also should be capable of handling higher screen resolutions while still performing well. (explain)

Radeon HD 7870 XT		29600 Mpixels/sec
Radeon R9 M280X		14400 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 15200 (106%)

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 moved over the external memory interface within a second. It's calculated by multiplying the card's interface width by the speed of its memory. If the card has DDR memory, it must be multiplied by 2 once again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The better the card's memory bandwidth, 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 texture map elements (texels) that can be applied per second. This number is worked out by multiplying the total amount of texture units of the card by the core clock speed of the chip. The better this number, the better the 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 most pixels that the graphics card could possibly write to the local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is calculated by multiplying the number 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 also depends on quite a few other factors, especially the memory bandwidth - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the ability to reach the max fill rate.