Radeon R9 M290X vs Radeon R9 M390X

Intro

The Radeon R9 M290X comes with a GPU core speed of 850 MHz, and the 4096 MB of GDDR5 RAM is set to run at 1200 MHz through a 256-bit bus. It also features 1280 SPUs, 80 TAUs, and 32 ROPs.

Compare all that to the Radeon R9 M390X, which has GPU core speed of 723 MHz, and 4096 MB of GDDR5 memory set to run at 1250 MHz through a 256-bit bus. It also features 2048 SPUs, 128 TAUs, and 32 Raster Operation Units.

Price Comparison

Specifications

Memory Bandwidth: Bandwidth is the largest amount of information (in units of MB per second) that can be moved 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 memory, the result should be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The better the memory bandwidth, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, HDR and high resolutions.

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

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels the video card could possibly write to its local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is calculated by multiplying the amount of ROPs by the clock speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - sometimes also referred to as Render Output Units) are responsible for filling the screen with pixels (the image). The actual pixel output rate also depends on lots of other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to get to the maximum fill rate.