Radeon R7 240 vs Radeon R9 290

Intro

Compare those specs to the Radeon R9 290, which comes with a core clock frequency of 800 MHz and a GDDR5 memory speed of 1250 MHz. It also features a 512-bit memory bus, and uses a 28 nm design. It features 2560 SPUs, 160 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 290		9876 points
Radeon R7 240		1218 points
	Difference: 8658 (711%)

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon R7 240		30 Watts
Radeon R9 290		300 Watts
	Difference: 270 Watts (900%)

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically speaking, the Radeon R9 290 will be 1011% quicker than the Radeon R7 240 in general, due to its higher data rate. (explain)

Radeon R9 290		320000 MB/sec
Radeon R7 240		28800 MB/sec
	Difference: 291200 (1011%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon R9 290 will be quite a bit (more or less 777%) better at AF than the Radeon R7 240. (explain)

Radeon R9 290		128000 Mtexels/sec
Radeon R7 240		14600 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 113400 (777%)

Pixel Rate

If running with a high screen resolution is important to you, then the Radeon R9 290 is a better choice, by a large margin. (explain)

Radeon R9 290		51200 Mpixels/sec
Radeon R7 240		5840 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 45360 (777%)

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 transported past the external memory interface in one second. It is calculated by multiplying the card's bus width by its memory speed. If it uses DDR RAM, it must be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The higher the bandwidth is, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, HDR and high resolutions.

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

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels that the graphics chip can possibly write to the local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number 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 filling the screen with pixels (the image). The actual pixel rate is also dependant on many other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to reach the maximum fill rate.