Radeon HD 7850 vs Radeon R9 290X

Intro

Compare all that to the Radeon R9 290X, which features a GPU core clock speed of 800 MHz, and 4096 MB of GDDR5 RAM running at 1250 MHz through a 512-bit bus. It also features 2816 SPUs, 176 TAUs, 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 R9 290X		10609 points
Radeon HD 7850		5200 points
	Difference: 5409 (104%)

Zcash Mining Hash Rate

Radeon R9 290X		369 Sol/s
Radeon HD 7850		171 Sol/s
	Difference: 198 (116%)

Ethereum Mining Hash Rate

Radeon R9 290X		29 Mh/s
Radeon HD 7850		13 Mh/s
	Difference: 16 (123%)

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon HD 7850		130 Watts
Radeon R9 290X		300 Watts
	Difference: 170 Watts (131%)

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically speaking, the Radeon R9 290X should be 108% faster than the Radeon HD 7850 in general, because of its higher data rate. (explain)

Radeon R9 290X		320000 MB/sec
Radeon HD 7850		153600 MB/sec
	Difference: 166400 (108%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon R9 290X is a lot (about 156%) faster with regards to anisotropic filtering than the Radeon HD 7850. (explain)

Radeon R9 290X		140800 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 7850		55040 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 85760 (156%)

Pixel Rate

If using a high screen resolution is important to you, then the Radeon R9 290X is a better choice, by a large margin. (explain)

Radeon R9 290X		51200 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 7850		27520 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 23680 (86%)

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 data (in units of megabytes per second) that can be transported over the external memory interface in a second. It's worked out by multiplying the card's interface width by its memory speed. If it uses DDR RAM, it should be multiplied by 2 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 anti-aliasing, HDR and higher screen resolutions.

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

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum amount of pixels the graphics card can possibly write to the local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is calculated by multiplying the number of colour ROPs by the clock speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - aka Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel fill rate is also dependant on many other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the ability to reach the max fill rate.