Radeon HD 7970 vs Radeon R9 M385X

Intro

Compare those specs to the Radeon R9 M385X, which has a clock speed of 1100 MHz and a GDDR5 memory frequency of 1500 MHz. It also features a 128-bit bus, and uses a 28 nm design. It is comprised of 896 SPUs, 56 TAUs, and 16 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Memory Bandwidth

The Radeon HD 7970 should theoretically be much faster than the Radeon R9 M385X overall. (explain)

Radeon HD 7970		264000 MB/sec
Radeon R9 M385X		96000 MB/sec
	Difference: 168000 (175%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 7970 will be a lot (approximately 92%) better at anisotropic filtering than the Radeon R9 M385X. (explain)

Radeon HD 7970		118400 Mtexels/sec
Radeon R9 M385X		61600 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 56800 (92%)

Pixel Rate

If using a high screen resolution is important to you, then the Radeon HD 7970 is a better choice, by far. (explain)

Radeon HD 7970		29600 Mpixels/sec
Radeon R9 M385X		17600 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 12000 (68%)

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 maximum amount of information (counted in megabytes per second) that can be transported across the external memory interface in a second. It's worked out by multiplying the card's bus width by the speed of its memory. If the card has DDR memory, it should be multiplied by 2 once again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The better the bandwidth is, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, High Dynamic Range and high resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum texture map elements (texels) that can be applied per second. This is calculated by multiplying the total texture units by the core clock speed of the chip. The higher this number, the better the video 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 that the graphics chip can possibly write to its local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is worked out by multiplying the amount of Render Output Units by the the core clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - sometimes also referred to as Render Output Units) are responsible for drawing the pixels (image) on the screen. The actual pixel output rate also depends 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 maximum fill rate.