Radeon HD 7950 vs Radeon R9 290X

Intro

Compare those specifications to the Radeon R9 290X, which features clock speeds of 800 MHz on the GPU, and 1250 MHz on the 4096 MB of GDDR5 RAM. It features 2816 SPUs as well as 176 TAUs 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.

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

In theory, the Radeon R9 290X is 33% faster than the Radeon HD 7950 in general, because of its greater data rate. (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 (more or less 57%) faster with regards to AF than the Radeon HD 7950. (explain)

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

Pixel Rate

If running with a high screen resolution is important to you, then the Radeon R9 290X is superior to the Radeon HD 7950, by a large margin. (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: Memory bandwidth is the maximum amount of data (measured in MB per second) that can be transferred over the external memory interface within a second. It is calculated by multiplying the card's bus width by its memory speed. In the case of DDR type RAM, it should be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. 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 can be applied in one second. This is worked out by multiplying the total texture units by the core speed of the chip. The better the texel rate, 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 that the graphics chip could possibly write 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 clock speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also called Render Output Units) are responsible for filling the screen with pixels (the image). The actual pixel rate also depends on quite a few other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to get to the max fill rate.