Radeon HD 7990 vs Radeon R9 290

Intro

Compare those specifications to the Radeon R9 290, which uses a 28 nm design. AMD has clocked the core speed at 800 MHz. The GDDR5 RAM is set to run at a frequency of 1250 MHz on this model. It features 2560 SPUs along with 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 HD 7990		15520 points
Radeon R9 290		9876 points
	Difference: 5644 (57%)

Ethereum Mining Hash Rate

Radeon HD 7990		32 Mh/s
Radeon R9 290		29 Mh/s
	Difference: 3 (10%)

Zcash Mining Hash Rate

Radeon HD 7990		513 Sol/s
Radeon R9 290		283 Sol/s
	Difference: 230 (81%)

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon R9 290		300 Watts
Radeon HD 7990		375 Watts
	Difference: 75 Watts (25%)

Memory Bandwidth

As far as performance goes, the Radeon HD 7990 should in theory be a lot superior to the Radeon R9 290 overall. (explain)

Radeon HD 7990		576000 MB/sec
Radeon R9 290		320000 MB/sec
	Difference: 256000 (80%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 7990 is quite a bit (more or less 90%) more effective at AF than the Radeon R9 290. (explain)

Radeon HD 7990		243200 Mtexels/sec
Radeon R9 290		128000 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 115200 (90%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon HD 7990 is a little bit (about 19%) faster with regards to FSAA than the Radeon R9 290, and also should be capable of handling higher screen resolutions without slowing down too much. (explain)

Radeon HD 7990		60800 Mpixels/sec
Radeon R9 290		51200 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 9600 (19%)

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.

One or more cards in this comparison are multi-core. This means that their bandwidth, texel and pixel rates are theoretically doubled - this does not mean the card will actually perform twice as fast, but only that it should in theory be able to. Actual game benchmarks will give a more accurate idea of what it's capable of.

Price Comparison

Specifications

Memory Bandwidth: Bandwidth is the max amount of data (in units of megabytes per second) that can be transported over the external memory interface in one second. It is calculated by multiplying the bus width by its memory clock speed. In the case of DDR RAM, it must be multiplied by 2 once again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The higher the 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 number of texture map elements (texels) that can be processed per second. This figure is worked out by multiplying the total texture units by the core clock speed of the chip. The better this number, the better the graphics card will be at texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels applied in a second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels that the graphics chip can possibly record to the local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is calculated by multiplying the amount of Raster Operations Pipelines by the the card's clock speed. 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 fill rate is also dependant on quite a few other factors, especially the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to reach the maximum fill rate.