Radeon R9 M280X vs Radeon R9 M290X

Intro

Compare all that to the Radeon R9 M290X, which features a clock speed of 850 MHz and a GDDR5 memory frequency of 1200 MHz. It also uses a 256-bit bus, and uses a 28 nm design. It is made up of 1280 SPUs, 80 Texture Address Units, and 32 Raster Operation Units.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon R9 M280X		75 Watts
Radeon R9 M290X		100 Watts
	Difference: 25 Watts (33%)

Memory Bandwidth

The Radeon R9 M290X, in theory, should be a lot faster than the Radeon R9 M280X in general. (explain)

Radeon R9 M290X		153600 MB/sec
Radeon R9 M280X		88000 MB/sec
	Difference: 65600 (75%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon R9 M290X is a lot (approximately 35%) faster with regards to anisotropic filtering than the Radeon R9 M280X. (explain)

Radeon R9 M290X		68000 Mtexels/sec
Radeon R9 M280X		50400 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 17600 (35%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon R9 M290X is a lot (more or less 89%) faster with regards to anti-aliasing than the Radeon R9 M280X, and also should be capable of handling higher resolutions while still performing well. (explain)

Radeon R9 M290X		27200 Mpixels/sec
Radeon R9 M280X		14400 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 12800 (89%)

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 largest amount of data (counted in MB per second) that can be transferred across the external memory interface in one second. The number is worked out by multiplying the card's interface width by its memory speed. If it uses DDR memory, it must be multiplied by 2 once again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The better the memory bandwidth, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, High Dynamic Range and high resolutions.

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

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum number of pixels that the graphics chip can possibly record to the local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is worked out by multiplying the number of Raster Operations Pipelines by the the core speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - sometimes also referred to as Render Output Units) are responsible for filling the screen with pixels (the image). The actual pixel rate also depends on quite a few other factors, especially the memory bandwidth - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to reach the max fill rate.