Radeon HD 6950 vs Radeon R9 M290X

Intro

Compare those specifications to the Radeon R9 M290X, which makes use of a 28 nm design. AMD has clocked the core speed at 850 MHz. The GDDR5 RAM works at a speed of 1200 MHz on this card. It features 1280 SPUs as well as 80 TAUs 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 6950		200 Watts
	Difference: 100 Watts (100%)

Memory Bandwidth

As far as performance goes, the Radeon HD 6950 should in theory be just a bit superior to the Radeon R9 M290X in general. (explain)

Radeon HD 6950		160000 MB/sec
Radeon R9 M290X		153600 MB/sec
	Difference: 6400 (4%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 6950 is a little bit (approximately 4%) better at texture filtering than the Radeon R9 M290X. (explain)

Radeon HD 6950		70400 Mtexels/sec
Radeon R9 M290X		68000 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 2400 (4%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon R9 M290X should be a small bit (approximately 6%) better at FSAA than the Radeon HD 6950, and will be able to handle higher screen resolutions without losing too much performance. (explain)

Radeon R9 M290X		27200 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 6950		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: Memory bandwidth is the max amount of data (counted in MB per second) that can be moved over the external memory interface in one second. It's calculated by multiplying the interface width by the speed of its memory. In the case of DDR type memory, it should be multiplied by 2 again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The better 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 number of texture map elements (texels) that are processed per second. This figure is calculated by multiplying the total amount of texture units by the core clock speed of the chip. The higher the texel rate, the better the card will be at texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels applied in one second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum number of pixels that the graphics card can possibly write to the local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is calculated by multiplying the number of Raster Operations Pipelines by the the core clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - sometimes also referred to as 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, especially the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to get to the max fill rate.