Radeon HD 6990 vs Radeon R9 M290X

Intro

Compare all that to the Radeon R9 M290X, which comes with a GPU core clock speed of 850 MHz, and 4096 MB of GDDR5 RAM running at 1200 MHz through a 256-bit bus. It also is made up of 1280 SPUs, 80 Texture Address Units, and 32 Raster Operation Units.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon R9 M290X		100 Watts
Radeon HD 6990		375 Watts
	Difference: 275 Watts (275%)

Memory Bandwidth

The Radeon HD 6990, in theory, should perform much faster than the Radeon R9 M290X in general. (explain)

Radeon HD 6990		320000 MB/sec
Radeon R9 M290X		153600 MB/sec
	Difference: 166400 (108%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 6990 will be a lot (more or less 134%) more effective at texture filtering than the Radeon R9 M290X. (explain)

Radeon HD 6990		159360 Mtexels/sec
Radeon R9 M290X		68000 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 91360 (134%)

Pixel Rate

If using a high resolution is important to you, then the Radeon HD 6990 is the winner, by far. (explain)

Radeon HD 6990		53120 Mpixels/sec
Radeon R9 M290X		27200 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 25920 (95%)

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.

One or more cards in this comparison are multi-core. This means that their bandwidth, texel and pixel rates are theoretically doubled - this does not mean the card will actually perform twice as fast, but only that it should in theory be able to. Actual game benchmarks will give a more accurate idea of what it's capable of.

Price Comparison

Specifications

Memory Bandwidth: Bandwidth is the maximum amount of data (measured in megabytes per second) that can be moved over the external memory interface in a second. The number is calculated by multiplying the card's bus width by its memory speed. If the card has 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 AA, High Dynamic Range and higher screen resolutions.

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

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