Radeon R7 250 vs Radeon R9 290

Intro

Compare all of that to the Radeon R9 290, which features core clock speeds of 800 MHz on the GPU, and 1250 MHz on the 4096 MB of GDDR5 RAM. It features 2560 SPUs along with 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

Theoretically speaking, the Radeon R9 290 should be quite a bit faster than 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 much (approximately 433%) more effective at anisotropic filtering than the Radeon R7 250. (explain)

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

Pixel Rate

The Radeon R9 290 should be a lot (approximately 540%) more effective at AA than the Radeon R7 250, and also able to handle higher resolutions without losing too much performance. (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 information (in units of MB per second) that can be transferred past the external memory interface in one second. The number is calculated by multiplying the interface width by its memory speed. In the case of DDR type memory, it should be multiplied by 2 once again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The better the card's memory bandwidth, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, HDR and higher screen resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum number of texture map elements (texels) that can be applied per second. This is calculated by multiplying the total amount of texture units by the core speed of the chip. The better this number, the better the video 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 number of pixels that the graphics card could possibly record to the local memory in a 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 outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel fill rate is also dependant on many other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to get to the maximum fill rate.