Radeon HD 7870 XT vs Radeon R9 290X

Intro

Compare all of that to the Radeon R9 290X, which comes with clock speeds of 800 MHz on the GPU, and 1250 MHz on the 4096 MB of GDDR5 RAM. It features 2816 SPUs along with 176 TAUs and 64 ROPs.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

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 R9 290X		10609 points
Radeon HD 7870 XT		6390 points
	Difference: 4219 (66%)

Ethereum Mining Hash Rate

Radeon R9 290X		29 Mh/s
Radeon HD 7870 XT		15 Mh/s
	Difference: 14 (93%)

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon HD 7870 XT		185 Watts
Radeon R9 290X		300 Watts
	Difference: 115 Watts (62%)

Memory Bandwidth

In theory, the Radeon R9 290X should be 67% quicker than the Radeon HD 7870 XT overall, due to its higher bandwidth. (explain)

Radeon R9 290X		320000 MB/sec
Radeon HD 7870 XT		192000 MB/sec
	Difference: 128000 (67%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon R9 290X will be much (more or less 59%) better at AF than the Radeon HD 7870 XT. (explain)

Radeon R9 290X		140800 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 7870 XT		88800 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 52000 (59%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon R9 290X is much (about 73%) faster with regards to AA than the Radeon HD 7870 XT, and will be capable of handling higher screen resolutions more effectively. (explain)

Radeon R9 290X		51200 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 7870 XT		29600 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 21600 (73%)

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 max amount of information (in units of megabytes per second) that can be transported across the external memory interface in a second. It's calculated by multiplying the interface width by its memory clock speed. If it uses DDR type memory, the result should be multiplied by 2 once again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The better the card's memory bandwidth, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, HDR and high resolutions.

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

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels that the graphics card can possibly write to its local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate 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 output rate also depends on quite a few other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the potential to get to the max fill rate.