Radeon R7 250 vs Radeon R9 290

Intro

Compare those specs to the Radeon R9 290, which has core clock speeds of 800 MHz on the GPU, and 1250 MHz on the 4096 MB of GDDR5 RAM. It features 2560 SPUs as well as 160 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.

3DMark Fire Strike Graphics Score

Radeon R9 290		9876 points
Radeon R7 250		1836 points
	Difference: 8040 (438%)

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon R7 250		65 Watts
Radeon R9 290		300 Watts
	Difference: 235 Watts (362%)

Memory Bandwidth

As far as performance goes, the Radeon R9 290 should in theory be much superior to the Radeon R7 250 overall. (explain)

Radeon R9 290		320000 MB/sec
Radeon R7 250		73600 MB/sec
	Difference: 246400 (335%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon R9 290 will be a lot (approximately 433%) faster with regards to texture filtering than the Radeon R7 250. (explain)

Radeon R9 290		128000 Mtexels/sec
Radeon R7 250		24000 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 104000 (433%)

Pixel Rate

If running with a high resolution is important to you, then the Radeon R9 290 is superior to the Radeon R7 250, by far. (explain)

Radeon R9 290		51200 Mpixels/sec
Radeon R7 250		8000 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 43200 (540%)

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 maximum amount of data (measured in megabytes per second) that can be transported across the external memory interface within a second. It is worked out by multiplying the card's bus width by its memory speed. If it uses DDR memory, the result should be multiplied by 2 once again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The better the memory bandwidth, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, High Dynamic Range and high resolutions.

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

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum number of pixels that the graphics chip can possibly record to its local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is worked out by multiplying the amount of colour ROPs by the the core speed of the card. 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 rate also depends on lots of other factors, especially the memory bandwidth - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the potential to reach the maximum fill rate.