Radeon HD 7990 vs Radeon R9 290

Intro

Compare those specs to the Radeon R9 290, which comes with 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 TAUs and 64 ROPs.

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 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 theoretically be a lot better than 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%) better at texture filtering 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 bit (about 19%) more effective at FSAA than the Radeon R9 290, and should be able to handle higher resolutions while still performing well. (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: Memory bandwidth is the largest amount of data (in units of MB per second) that can be moved over the external memory interface in one second. It's worked out by multiplying the card's interface width by its memory speed. If the card has DDR RAM, the result should be multiplied by 2 once again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The better the memory bandwidth, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, HDR and high resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum texture map elements (texels) that are 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 in a second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum amount of pixels that the graphics card could possibly write to the local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is worked out by multiplying the number of Raster Operations Pipelines 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 rate also depends on many other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the ability to reach the maximum fill rate.