Radeon HD 7870 XT vs Radeon R9 290X

Intro

Compare all that to the Radeon R9 290X, which comes with core clock speeds of 800 MHz on the GPU, and 1250 MHz on the 4096 MB of GDDR5 RAM. It features 2816 SPUs as well as 176 Texture Address Units 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

As far as performance goes, the Radeon R9 290X should in theory be much better than the Radeon HD 7870 XT overall. (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 a lot (approximately 59%) better at anisotropic filtering 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

If running with a high resolution is important to you, then the Radeon R9 290X is the winner, by a large margin. (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 maximum amount of information (in units of megabytes per second) that can be moved past the external memory interface in one second. It's calculated by multiplying the card's interface width by its memory speed. If it uses DDR type memory, the result should be multiplied by 2 once again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher the bandwidth is, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, HDR and higher screen resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum amount of texture map elements (texels) that can be processed per second. This figure is calculated 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 per second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels the video card can possibly write to its local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is worked out by multiplying the number of Raster Operations Pipelines by the the card's clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - sometimes also referred to as 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 - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the ability to get to the max fill rate.