Radeon HD 7950 vs Radeon R9 M290X

Intro

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

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon R9 M290X		100 Watts
Radeon HD 7950		200 Watts
	Difference: 100 Watts (100%)

Memory Bandwidth

The Radeon HD 7950, in theory, should be quite a bit faster than the Radeon R9 M290X in general. (explain)

Radeon HD 7950		240000 MB/sec
Radeon R9 M290X		153600 MB/sec
	Difference: 86400 (56%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 7950 will be quite a bit (about 32%) faster with regards to AF than the Radeon R9 M290X. (explain)

Radeon HD 7950		89600 Mtexels/sec
Radeon R9 M290X		68000 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 21600 (32%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon R9 M290X should be just a bit (approximately 6%) more effective at FSAA than the Radeon HD 7950, and should be able to handle higher screen resolutions more effectively. (explain)

Radeon R9 M290X		27200 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 7950		25600 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 1600 (6%)

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 (measured in megabytes per second) that can be transferred over the external memory interface in a second. It is worked out by multiplying the card's interface width by its memory speed. If it uses DDR memory, the result should be multiplied by 2 once again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher the bandwidth is, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, High Dynamic Range and high resolutions.

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

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels the graphics card can possibly write to its local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is calculated by multiplying the amount of Raster Operations Pipelines by the the card's clock speed. 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 output rate also depends on many other factors, especially the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to reach the max fill rate.