Radeon R9 280 vs Radeon R9 M290X

Intro

Compare those specs to the Radeon R9 M290X, which uses a 28 nm design. AMD has set the core speed at 850 MHz. The GDDR5 memory works at a speed of 1200 MHz on this specific card. It features 1280 SPUs as well as 80 Texture Address Units and 32 ROPs.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon R9 M290X		100 Watts
Radeon R9 280		250 Watts
	Difference: 150 Watts (150%)

Memory Bandwidth

The Radeon R9 280 should in theory perform much faster than the Radeon R9 M290X overall. (explain)

Radeon R9 280		240000 MB/sec
Radeon R9 M290X		153600 MB/sec
	Difference: 86400 (56%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon R9 280 should be much (about 54%) more effective at anisotropic filtering than the Radeon R9 M290X. (explain)

Radeon R9 280		104496 Mtexels/sec
Radeon R9 M290X		68000 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 36496 (54%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon R9 280 should be a little bit (about 10%) faster with regards to AA than the Radeon R9 M290X, and should be capable of handling higher screen resolutions more effectively. (explain)

Radeon R9 280		29856 Mpixels/sec
Radeon R9 M290X		27200 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 2656 (10%)

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 (in units of megabytes per second) that can be moved over the external memory interface within a second. It's calculated by multiplying the interface width by the speed of its memory. If it uses DDR RAM, the result should be multiplied by 2 once again. If 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, High Dynamic Range and high resolutions.

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

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum number of pixels that the graphics chip could possibly write to the local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is calculated by multiplying the amount of colour ROPs by the the core clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also called Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel fill rate is also dependant on lots of other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the ability to reach the maximum fill rate.