Radeon HD 7950 vs Radeon R9 290X

Intro

Compare all of that to the Radeon R9 290X, which comes with a clock frequency of 800 MHz and a GDDR5 memory frequency of 1250 MHz. It also features a 512-bit memory bus, and makes use of a 28 nm design. It features 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 7950		7731 points
	Difference: 2878 (37%)

Zcash Mining Hash Rate

Radeon R9 290X		369 Sol/s
Radeon HD 7950		235 Sol/s
	Difference: 134 (57%)

Ethereum Mining Hash Rate

Radeon R9 290X		29 Mh/s
Radeon HD 7950		21 Mh/s
	Difference: 8 (38%)

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

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

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically speaking, the Radeon R9 290X should perform quite a bit faster than the Radeon HD 7950 overall. (explain)

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

Texel Rate

The Radeon R9 290X is a lot (about 57%) faster with regards to texture filtering than the Radeon HD 7950. (explain)

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

Pixel Rate

The Radeon R9 290X should be much (approximately 100%) better at full screen anti-aliasing than the Radeon HD 7950, and capable of handling higher resolutions without slowing down too much. (explain)

Radeon R9 290X		51200 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 7950		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 max amount of information (measured in MB per second) that can be moved across the external memory interface in a second. It is worked out by multiplying the card's bus width by its memory speed. If it uses DDR RAM, it should be multiplied by 2 again. If DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The higher the bandwidth is, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, HDR and high resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum amount of texture map elements (texels) that are applied in one second. This number is calculated by multiplying the total texture units by the core clock speed of the chip. The better this number, the better the card will be at 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 write to its local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate 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 drawing the pixels (image) on the screen. The actual pixel fill rate also depends on many other factors, especially the memory bandwidth - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to reach the max fill rate.