Radeon R5 M330 vs Radeon R9 290X

Intro

Compare that to the Radeon R9 290X, which uses a 28 nm design. AMD has clocked the core frequency at 800 MHz. The GDDR5 RAM works at a frequency of 1250 MHz on this particular card. It features 2816 SPUs as well as 176 Texture Address Units and 64 Rasterization Operator Units.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically speaking, the Radeon R9 290X should be much faster than the Radeon R5 M330 overall. (explain)

Radeon R9 290X		320000 MB/sec
Radeon R5 M330		14400 MB/sec
	Difference: 305600 (2122%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon R9 290X is a lot (approximately 583%) better at anisotropic filtering than the Radeon R5 M330. (explain)

Radeon R9 290X		140800 Mtexels/sec
Radeon R5 M330		20600 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 120200 (583%)

Pixel Rate

If running with lots of anti-aliasing is important to you, then the Radeon R9 290X is the winner, by far. (explain)

Radeon R9 290X		51200 Mpixels/sec
Radeon R5 M330		8240 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 42960 (521%)

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 maximum amount of data (measured in megabytes per second) that can be transferred across the external memory interface in one second. It is worked out by multiplying the card's bus width by its memory clock speed. In the case of DDR type memory, it should be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses 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 higher screen 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 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 processed in a second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum amount of pixels that the graphics chip could possibly write to the local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is calculated by multiplying the number of Raster Operations Pipelines by the the core clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - aka Render Output Units) are responsible for drawing the pixels (image) on the screen. The actual pixel output rate also depends on quite a few other factors, especially the memory bandwidth - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the potential to reach the max fill rate.