Radeon HD 6970 vs Radeon R9 M390X

Intro

Compare those specs to the Radeon R9 M390X, which features a clock frequency of 723 MHz and a GDDR5 memory frequency of 1250 MHz. It also features a 256-bit bus, and makes use of a 28 nm design. It is made up of 2048 SPUs, 128 TAUs, and 32 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon R9 M390X		125 Watts
Radeon HD 6970		250 Watts
	Difference: 125 Watts (100%)

Memory Bandwidth

In theory, the Radeon HD 6970 should be 10% quicker than the Radeon R9 M390X overall, because of its higher bandwidth. (explain)

Radeon HD 6970		176000 MB/sec
Radeon R9 M390X		160000 MB/sec
	Difference: 16000 (10%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon R9 M390X should be a small bit (approximately 10%) more effective at AF than the Radeon HD 6970. (explain)

Radeon R9 M390X		92544 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 6970		84480 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 8064 (10%)

Pixel Rate

If using high levels of AA is important to you, then the Radeon HD 6970 is superior to the Radeon R9 M390X, by far. (explain)

Radeon HD 6970		28160 Mpixels/sec
Radeon R9 M390X		23136 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 5024 (22%)

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 information (measured in MB per second) that can be transported over the external memory interface in a second. It is worked out by multiplying the interface width by the speed of its memory. If it uses DDR memory, it should be multiplied by 2 once again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher the memory bandwidth, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, High Dynamic Range and high resolutions.

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

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels that the graphics chip could possibly record to the local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is worked out by multiplying the amount of Render Output Units by the the card's clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also sometimes called Render Output Units) are responsible for drawing the pixels (image) on the screen. The actual pixel output rate also depends on many other factors, especially the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the potential to get to the maximum fill rate.