Radeon HD 7870 vs Radeon R9 M295X

Intro

Compare all that to the Radeon R9 M295X, which uses a 28 nm design. AMD has set the core speed at 750 MHz. The GDDR5 RAM runs at a speed of 1375 MHz on this model. It features 2048 SPUs along with 128 Texture Address Units and 32 Rasterization Operator Units.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon R9 M295X		125 Watts
Radeon HD 7870		175 Watts
	Difference: 50 Watts (40%)

Memory Bandwidth

In theory, the Radeon R9 M295X should perform a little bit faster than the Radeon HD 7870 overall. (explain)

Radeon R9 M295X		176000 MB/sec
Radeon HD 7870		153600 MB/sec
	Difference: 22400 (15%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon R9 M295X is a little bit (more or less 20%) better at AF than the Radeon HD 7870. (explain)

Radeon R9 M295X		96000 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 7870		80000 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 16000 (20%)

Pixel Rate

If running with a high screen resolution is important to you, then the Radeon HD 7870 is the winner, by far. (explain)

Radeon HD 7870		32000 Mpixels/sec
Radeon R9 M295X		24000 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 8000 (33%)

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 largest amount of data (counted in megabytes per second) that can be transferred past the external memory interface in one second. It is calculated by multiplying the bus width by its memory speed. If it uses 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 high resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum number of texture map elements (texels) that are applied in one second. This is worked out by multiplying the total number of texture units by the core speed of the chip. The better this number, the better the 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 maximum amount of pixels that the graphics card can possibly record to its local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is calculated by multiplying the amount of ROPs by the the card's clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also called Render Output Units) are responsible for filling the screen with pixels (the image). The actual pixel rate is also dependant on quite a few other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the ability to get to the maximum fill rate.