Radeon HD 7870 vs Radeon R9 290

Intro

Compare all that to the Radeon R9 290, which makes use of a 28 nm design. AMD has clocked the core frequency at 800 MHz. The GDDR5 memory works at a frequency of 1250 MHz on this particular model. It features 2560 SPUs along with 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 R9 290		9876 points
Radeon HD 7870		6230 points
	Difference: 3646 (59%)

Zcash Mining Hash Rate

Radeon R9 290		283 Sol/s
Radeon HD 7870		172 Sol/s
	Difference: 111 (65%)

Ethereum Mining Hash Rate

Radeon R9 290		29 Mh/s
Radeon HD 7870		16 Mh/s
	Difference: 13 (81%)

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon HD 7870		175 Watts
Radeon R9 290		300 Watts
	Difference: 125 Watts (71%)

Memory Bandwidth

Performance-wise, the Radeon R9 290 should in theory be quite a bit superior to the Radeon HD 7870 overall. (explain)

Radeon R9 290		320000 MB/sec
Radeon HD 7870		153600 MB/sec
	Difference: 166400 (108%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon R9 290 should be a lot (about 60%) faster with regards to anisotropic filtering than the Radeon HD 7870. (explain)

Radeon R9 290		128000 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 7870		80000 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 48000 (60%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon R9 290 is much (more or less 60%) more effective at anti-aliasing than the Radeon HD 7870, and able to handle higher screen resolutions while still performing well. (explain)

Radeon R9 290		51200 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 7870		32000 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 19200 (60%)

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 largest amount of information (in units of megabytes per second) that can be transferred past the external memory interface within a second. The number is calculated by multiplying the interface width by its memory speed. If it uses DDR RAM, it should be multiplied by 2 once again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The better the card's memory bandwidth, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, HDR and higher screen resolutions.

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

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum amount of pixels that the graphics card could possibly record to its local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is calculated by multiplying the amount of Render Output Units 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 quite a few other factors, especially the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to get to the maximum fill rate.