Radeon HD 6790 vs Radeon R9 M385X

Intro

Compare all that to the Radeon R9 M385X, which makes use of a 28 nm design. AMD has clocked the core frequency at 1100 MHz. The GDDR5 RAM works at a frequency of 1500 MHz on this model. It features 896 SPUs along with 56 Texture Address Units and 16 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically speaking, the Radeon HD 6790 will be 40% faster than the Radeon R9 M385X overall, because of its greater bandwidth. (explain)

Radeon HD 6790		134400 MB/sec
Radeon R9 M385X		96000 MB/sec
	Difference: 38400 (40%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon R9 M385X is a lot (more or less 83%) better at texture filtering than the Radeon HD 6790. (explain)

Radeon R9 M385X		61600 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 6790		33600 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 28000 (83%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon R9 M385X is a lot (approximately 31%) better at anti-aliasing than the Radeon HD 6790, and able to handle higher screen resolutions better. (explain)

Radeon R9 M385X		17600 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 6790		13440 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 4160 (31%)

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 largest amount of data (measured in megabytes per second) that can be transported past the external memory interface in a second. The number is worked out by multiplying the bus width by the speed of its memory. In the case of DDR memory, it should be multiplied by 2 again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The better the card's memory bandwidth, 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 amount of texture map elements (texels) that are processed per second. This number is calculated by multiplying the total texture units of the card by the core speed of the chip. The better this number, the better the video 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 most pixels the graphics card could possibly record to its local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is worked out by multiplying the amount of Render Output Units by the the core speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - aka Render Output Units) are responsible for filling the screen with pixels (the image). The actual pixel fill rate is also dependant on lots of other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the ability to get to the maximum fill rate.