Radeon HD 7790 vs Radeon R9 M290X

Intro

Compare all that to the Radeon R9 M290X, which uses a 28 nm design. AMD has clocked the core frequency at 850 MHz. The GDDR5 memory runs at a speed of 1200 MHz on this card. It features 1280 SPUs along with 80 Texture Address Units and 32 Rasterization Operator Units.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon HD 7790		85 Watts
Radeon R9 M290X		100 Watts
	Difference: 15 Watts (18%)

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically speaking, the Radeon R9 M290X is 60% quicker than the Radeon HD 7790 in general, because of its greater data rate. (explain)

Radeon R9 M290X		153600 MB/sec
Radeon HD 7790		96000 MB/sec
	Difference: 57600 (60%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon R9 M290X will be much (approximately 21%) better at texture filtering than the Radeon HD 7790. (explain)

Radeon R9 M290X		68000 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 7790		56000 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 12000 (21%)

Pixel Rate

If running with a high resolution is important to you, then the Radeon R9 M290X is superior to the Radeon HD 7790, by far. (explain)

Radeon R9 M290X		27200 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 7790		16000 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 11200 (70%)

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 data (in units of megabytes per second) that can be transported over the external memory interface within a second. The number is calculated by multiplying the card's bus width by its memory speed. If the card has DDR memory, it should be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The higher 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 number of texture map elements (texels) that can be applied in one second. This is worked out by multiplying the total amount of texture units of the card by the core clock speed of the chip. The higher the texel rate, the better the video card will be at handling texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels per second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels the graphics card can possibly record to its local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is worked out by multiplying the number of ROPs by the the core clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also sometimes called Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel fill rate also depends on many other factors, especially the memory bandwidth - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the ability to get to the maximum fill rate.