Radeon HD 5830 vs Radeon R9 M290X

Intro

Compare all that to the Radeon R9 M290X, which comes with core speeds of 850 MHz on the GPU, and 1200 MHz on the 4096 MB of GDDR5 memory. It features 1280 SPUs along with 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 5830		175 Watts
	Difference: 75 Watts (75%)

Memory Bandwidth

In theory, the Radeon R9 M290X should perform a small bit faster than the Radeon HD 5830 overall. (explain)

Radeon R9 M290X		153600 MB/sec
Radeon HD 5830		128000 MB/sec
	Difference: 25600 (20%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon R9 M290X will be quite a bit (more or less 52%) faster with regards to AF than the Radeon HD 5830. (explain)

Radeon R9 M290X		68000 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 5830		44800 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 23200 (52%)

Pixel Rate

If using high levels of AA is important to you, then the Radeon R9 M290X is a better choice, by a large margin. (explain)

Radeon R9 M290X		27200 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 5830		12800 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 14400 (113%)

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 max amount of information (measured in MB per second) that can be moved over the external memory interface within a second. The number is calculated by multiplying the bus width by its memory speed. If it uses DDR type RAM, it should be multiplied by 2 once again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The better the memory bandwidth, the better 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 in one second. This is worked out by multiplying the total number of texture units of the card by the core speed of the chip. The better the texel rate, the better the card will be at texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels in a second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum number of pixels the video card can possibly record to the local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is calculated by multiplying the amount of ROPs 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 rate also depends on quite a few other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the potential to reach the max fill rate.