Radeon HD 7950 3GB vs Radeon R9 290X

Intro

Compare those specs to the Radeon R9 290X, which uses a 28 nm design. AMD has set the core frequency at 800 MHz. The GDDR5 RAM is set to run at a speed of 1250 MHz on this particular card. It features 2816 SPUs along with 176 Texture Address Units and 64 Rasterization Operator Units.

Display Graphs

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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

The Radeon R9 290X should theoretically perform quite a bit faster than the Radeon HD 7950 3GB in general. (explain)

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

Texel Rate

The Radeon R9 290X should be a lot (more or less 57%) better at anisotropic filtering 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 will be much (approximately 100%) faster with regards to AA than the Radeon HD 7950 3GB, and should be able to handle higher screen resolutions without slowing down too much. (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: Memory bandwidth is the maximum amount of data (measured in MB per second) that can be transferred over the external memory interface in a second. It's calculated by multiplying the card's bus width by the speed of its memory. In the case of DDR memory, it should be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The higher the card's memory bandwidth, 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 texture map elements (texels) that can be processed per second. This is calculated by multiplying the total number of texture units of the card 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 in a second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum amount of pixels that the graphics chip can possibly record to its local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is worked out by multiplying the amount of Raster Operations Pipelines by the the core speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also called Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel rate is also dependant on quite a few other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the ability to get to the max fill rate.