Radeon R7 M360 vs Radeon R9 280

Intro

Compare that to the Radeon R9 280, which makes use of a 28 nm design. AMD has clocked the core speed at 933 MHz. The GDDR5 RAM runs at a frequency of 1250 MHz on this model. It features 1792 SPUs as well as 112 Texture Address Units and 32 ROPs.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically speaking, the Radeon R9 280 should be 1400% quicker than the Radeon R7 M360 overall, due to its greater bandwidth. (explain)

Radeon R9 280		240000 MB/sec
Radeon R7 M360		16000 MB/sec
	Difference: 224000 (1400%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon R9 280 is much (more or less 287%) better at AF than the Radeon R7 M360. (explain)

Radeon R9 280		104496 Mtexels/sec
Radeon R7 M360		27000 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 77496 (287%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon R9 280 is a lot (more or less 232%) faster with regards to full screen anti-aliasing than the Radeon R7 M360, and also will be able to handle higher screen resolutions without losing too much performance. (explain)

Radeon R9 280		29856 Mpixels/sec
Radeon R7 M360		9000 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 20856 (232%)

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 MB per second) that can be transferred past the external memory interface in one second. It's worked out by multiplying the card's interface width by its memory speed. If the card has DDR type RAM, it should be multiplied by 2 once again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher the bandwidth is, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, High Dynamic Range and higher screen resolutions.

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

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum amount of pixels the video card can possibly record to its local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is worked out by multiplying the number of colour 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 fill rate is also dependant on many other factors, especially the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the ability to get to the max fill rate.