Radeon HD 7850 vs Radeon HD 7950

Intro

Compare those specifications to the Radeon HD 7950, which comes with a GPU core clock speed of 800 MHz, and 1536 MB of GDDR5 RAM set to run at 1250 MHz through a 384-bit bus. It also is made up of 1792 SPUs, 112 Texture Address Units, and 32 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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Benchmarks

These are real-world performance benchmarks that were submitted by Hardware Compare users. The scores seen here are the average of all benchmarks submitted for each respective test and hardware.

3DMark Fire Strike Graphics Score

Radeon HD 7950		7731 points
Radeon HD 7850		5200 points
	Difference: 2531 (49%)

Zcash Mining Hash Rate

Radeon HD 7950		235 Sol/s
Radeon HD 7850		171 Sol/s
	Difference: 64 (37%)

Ethereum Mining Hash Rate

Radeon HD 7950		21 Mh/s
Radeon HD 7850		13 Mh/s
	Difference: 8 (62%)

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon HD 7850		130 Watts
Radeon HD 7950		200 Watts
	Difference: 70 Watts (54%)

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically speaking, the Radeon HD 7950 should be 56% quicker than the Radeon HD 7850 overall, because of its greater bandwidth. (explain)

Radeon HD 7950		240000 MB/sec
Radeon HD 7850		153600 MB/sec
	Difference: 86400 (56%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 7950 will be a lot (about 63%) more effective at texture filtering than the Radeon HD 7850. (explain)

Radeon HD 7950		89600 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 7850		55040 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 34560 (63%)

Pixel Rate

If running with lots of anti-aliasing is important to you, then the Radeon HD 7850 is superior to the Radeon HD 7950, though not by far. (explain)

Radeon HD 7850		27520 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 7950		25600 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 1920 (8%)

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 maximum amount of information (counted in megabytes per second) that can be moved over the external memory interface in a second. It's calculated by multiplying the bus width by its memory speed. In the case of DDR memory, the result should be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The higher the card's memory bandwidth, the better 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 number of texture map elements (texels) that can be processed per second. This number is calculated by multiplying the total number of texture units of the card by the core clock speed of the chip. The better the texel rate, the better the video card will be at 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 can possibly record to its local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is worked out by multiplying the amount of colour ROPs by the the core clock speed. 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 quite a few other factors, especially the memory bandwidth - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to get to the max fill rate.