Radeon HD 7950 3GB vs Radeon R9 290X

Intro

Compare all of that to the Radeon R9 290X, which has clock speeds of 800 MHz on the GPU, and 1250 MHz on the 4096 MB of GDDR5 memory. 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.

Zcash Mining Hash Rate

Radeon R9 290X		369 Sol/s
Radeon HD 7950 3GB		229 Sol/s
	Difference: 140 (61%)

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon HD 7950 3GB		200 Watts
Radeon R9 290X		300 Watts
	Difference: 100 Watts (50%)

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically speaking, the Radeon R9 290X should be 33% quicker than the Radeon HD 7950 3GB in general, because of its greater data rate. (explain)

Radeon R9 290X		320000 MB/sec
Radeon HD 7950 3GB		240000 MB/sec
	Difference: 80000 (33%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon R9 290X will be quite a bit (about 57%) more effective at AF than the Radeon HD 7950 3GB. (explain)

Radeon R9 290X		140800 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 7950 3GB		89600 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 51200 (57%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon R9 290X is much (approximately 100%) faster with regards to AA than the Radeon HD 7950 3GB, and also should be able to handle higher screen resolutions better. (explain)

Radeon R9 290X		51200 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 7950 3GB		25600 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 25600 (100%)

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 information (in units of MB per second) that can be transported over the external memory interface in a second. The number is worked out by multiplying the bus width by the speed of its memory. If the card has DDR type memory, it should be multiplied by 2 once again. If DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The better the bandwidth is, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, High Dynamic Range and higher screen resolutions.

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

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum number of pixels the video card can possibly record to its local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is calculated by multiplying the number of Raster Operations Pipelines 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 rate is also dependant on lots of other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to get to the maximum fill rate.