Radeon HD 7990 vs Radeon R9 290X

Intro

Compare those specifications to the Radeon R9 290X, which comes with a core clock speed of 800 MHz and a GDDR5 memory frequency of 1250 MHz. It also uses a 512-bit bus, and uses a 28 nm design. It is comprised of 2816 SPUs, 176 Texture Address Units, and 64 Raster Operation Units.

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 HD 7990		15520 points
Radeon R9 290X		10609 points
	Difference: 4911 (46%)

Ethereum Mining Hash Rate

Radeon HD 7990		32 Mh/s
Radeon R9 290X		29 Mh/s
	Difference: 3 (10%)

Zcash Mining Hash Rate

Radeon HD 7990		513 Sol/s
Radeon R9 290X		369 Sol/s
	Difference: 144 (39%)

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon R9 290X		300 Watts
Radeon HD 7990		375 Watts
	Difference: 75 Watts (25%)

Memory Bandwidth

As far as performance goes, the Radeon HD 7990 should in theory be quite a bit better than the Radeon R9 290X overall. (explain)

Radeon HD 7990		576000 MB/sec
Radeon R9 290X		320000 MB/sec
	Difference: 256000 (80%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 7990 should be much (more or less 73%) better at texture filtering than the Radeon R9 290X. (explain)

Radeon HD 7990		243200 Mtexels/sec
Radeon R9 290X		140800 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 102400 (73%)

Pixel Rate

If using a high screen resolution is important to you, then the Radeon HD 7990 is a better choice, though not by far. (explain)

Radeon HD 7990		60800 Mpixels/sec
Radeon R9 290X		51200 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 9600 (19%)

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.

One or more cards in this comparison are multi-core. This means that their bandwidth, texel and pixel rates are theoretically doubled - this does not mean the card will actually perform twice as fast, but only that it should in theory be able to. Actual game benchmarks will give a more accurate idea of what it's capable of.

Price Comparison

Specifications

Memory Bandwidth: Memory bandwidth is the largest amount of data (in units of megabytes per second) that can be transported past the external memory interface in one second. It is calculated by multiplying the card's interface width by its memory clock speed. In the case of DDR type memory, the result should be multiplied by 2 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 is calculated by multiplying the total amount of texture units of the card by the core clock 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 per second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels the graphics card can possibly record to its local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is worked out by multiplying the number of colour ROPs by the clock speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also sometimes called Render Output Units) are responsible for filling the screen with pixels (the image). The actual pixel rate also depends on quite a few other factors, especially the memory bandwidth - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the ability to reach the maximum fill rate.