Radeon HD 7850 vs Radeon R9 290X

Intro

Compare those specifications to the Radeon R9 290X, which has GPU core speed of 800 MHz, and 4096 MB of GDDR5 RAM set to run at 1250 MHz through a 512-bit bus. It also 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 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, the Radeon R9 290X should perform a lot faster than the Radeon HD 7850 in general. (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 (approximately 156%) better at AF than the Radeon HD 7850. (explain)

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

Pixel Rate

If running with a high resolution is important to you, then the Radeon R9 290X is the winner, by far. (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: Memory bandwidth is the maximum amount of data (in units of MB per second) that can be moved past the external memory interface in a second. It is worked out by multiplying the bus width by its memory speed. In the case of DDR RAM, it should be multiplied by 2 once again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The higher the bandwidth is, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, HDR and high resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum amount of texture map elements (texels) that can be applied per second. This is worked out by multiplying the total 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 in one second.

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