Radeon HD 7870 XT vs Radeon R9 290

Intro

Compare all of that to the Radeon R9 290, which has a core clock speed of 800 MHz and a GDDR5 memory frequency of 1250 MHz. It also features a 512-bit memory bus, and uses a 28 nm design. It is comprised of 2560 SPUs, 160 Texture Address Units, 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 290		9876 points
Radeon HD 7870 XT		6390 points
	Difference: 3486 (55%)

Ethereum Mining Hash Rate

Radeon R9 290		29 Mh/s
Radeon HD 7870 XT		15 Mh/s
	Difference: 14 (93%)

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon HD 7870 XT		185 Watts
Radeon R9 290		300 Watts
	Difference: 115 Watts (62%)

Memory Bandwidth

The Radeon R9 290, in theory, should perform a lot faster than the Radeon HD 7870 XT overall. (explain)

Radeon R9 290		320000 MB/sec
Radeon HD 7870 XT		192000 MB/sec
	Difference: 128000 (67%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon R9 290 will be much (approximately 44%) more effective at texture filtering than the Radeon HD 7870 XT. (explain)

Radeon R9 290		128000 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 7870 XT		88800 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 39200 (44%)

Pixel Rate

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

Radeon R9 290		51200 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 7870 XT		29600 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 21600 (73%)

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 (counted in MB per second) that can be transferred over the external memory interface within a second. The number is worked out by multiplying the bus width by its memory speed. If the card has DDR type memory, it must be multiplied by 2 once again. If DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The higher the card's memory bandwidth, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, High Dynamic Range and high resolutions.

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

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels that the graphics chip could possibly write to its local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is calculated by multiplying the number of colour ROPs by the the card's clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also sometimes 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, especially the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the potential to get to the maximum fill rate.