Radeon HD 7970 vs Radeon R9 M280X

Intro

Compare all that to the Radeon R9 M280X, which has a GPU core clock speed of 900 MHz, and 4096 MB of GDDR5 memory running at 1375 MHz through a 128-bit bus. It also is made up of 896 Stream Processors, 56 Texture Address Units, and 16 Raster Operation Units.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon R9 M280X		75 Watts
Radeon HD 7970		250 Watts
	Difference: 175 Watts (233%)

Memory Bandwidth

As far as performance goes, the Radeon HD 7970 should theoretically be much better than the Radeon R9 M280X in general. (explain)

Radeon HD 7970		264000 MB/sec
Radeon R9 M280X		88000 MB/sec
	Difference: 176000 (200%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 7970 should be much (approximately 135%) better at AF than the Radeon R9 M280X. (explain)

Radeon HD 7970		118400 Mtexels/sec
Radeon R9 M280X		50400 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 68000 (135%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon HD 7970 should be quite a bit (more or less 106%) better at FSAA than the Radeon R9 M280X, and will be capable of handling higher screen resolutions more effectively. (explain)

Radeon HD 7970		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 (in units of MB per second) that can be transported across the external memory interface within a second. It's worked out by multiplying the bus width by its memory clock speed. In the case of DDR memory, the result should be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher the card's memory bandwidth, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, HDR and high resolutions.

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

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels the video card can possibly write to its local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is calculated by multiplying the number of Raster Operations Pipelines by the the core speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also sometimes called Render Output Units) are responsible for filling the screen with pixels (the image). The actual pixel fill rate is also dependant on many other factors, especially the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to get to the max fill rate.