Radeon HD 7870 vs Radeon R9 290

Intro

Compare that to the Radeon R9 290, which has a clock speed of 800 MHz and a GDDR5 memory speed of 1250 MHz. It also makes use of 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 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

The Radeon R9 290 should in theory be quite a bit faster than 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 (more or less 60%) better at AF 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 a lot (more or less 60%) better at AA than the Radeon HD 7870, and able to handle higher resolutions better. (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: Bandwidth is the maximum amount of information (counted in megabytes per second) that can be transported past the external memory interface in a second. It is calculated by multiplying the bus width by its memory speed. If it uses DDR RAM, it must be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The higher 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 texture map elements (texels) that are applied in one second. This number is calculated by multiplying the total amount of texture units of the card by the core speed of the chip. The better this number, the better the graphics card will be at handling texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels in a second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum number of pixels that the graphics chip could possibly write to the local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is worked out by multiplying the amount of colour ROPs by the clock speed of the card. 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 rate is also dependant on lots of other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the ability to reach the maximum fill rate.