Radeon HD 7790 vs Radeon R9 290

Intro

Compare that to the Radeon R9 290, which comes with a clock speed of 800 MHz and a GDDR5 memory frequency of 1250 MHz. It also features a 512-bit memory bus, and makes use of a 28 nm design. It is made up of 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 HD 7790		4330 points
	Difference: 5546 (128%)

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon HD 7790		85 Watts
Radeon R9 290		300 Watts
	Difference: 215 Watts (253%)

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically speaking, the Radeon R9 290 should be 233% quicker than the Radeon HD 7790 in general, because of its greater data rate. (explain)

Radeon R9 290		320000 MB/sec
Radeon HD 7790		96000 MB/sec
	Difference: 224000 (233%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon R9 290 is quite a bit (more or less 129%) faster with regards to anisotropic filtering than the Radeon HD 7790. (explain)

Radeon R9 290		128000 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 7790		56000 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 72000 (129%)

Pixel Rate

If using high levels of AA 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 HD 7790		16000 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 35200 (220%)

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 moved across the external memory interface within a second. It's worked out by multiplying the interface width by the speed of its memory. In the case of DDR type RAM, it must be multiplied by 2 once again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The better the memory bandwidth, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, High Dynamic Range and high resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum number of texture map elements (texels) that are applied per second. This number is calculated by multiplying the total texture units by the core clock speed of the chip. The higher 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 can possibly record to the local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is worked out by multiplying the amount of ROPs by the the core clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - aka Render Output Units) are responsible for drawing the pixels (image) on the screen. The actual pixel rate is also dependant on many other factors, especially the memory bandwidth - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the potential to get to the maximum fill rate.