Radeon HD 7850 vs Radeon R9 290

Intro

Compare those specifications to the Radeon R9 290, which features a clock speed of 800 MHz and a GDDR5 memory speed of 1250 MHz. It also makes use of a 512-bit bus, and uses a 28 nm design. It is comprised of 2560 SPUs, 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 R9 290		9876 points
Radeon HD 7850		5200 points
	Difference: 4676 (90%)

Zcash Mining Hash Rate

Radeon R9 290		283 Sol/s
Radeon HD 7850		171 Sol/s
	Difference: 112 (65%)

Ethereum Mining Hash Rate

Radeon R9 290		29 Mh/s
Radeon HD 7850		13 Mh/s
	Difference: 16 (123%)

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon HD 7850		130 Watts
Radeon R9 290		300 Watts
	Difference: 170 Watts (131%)

Memory Bandwidth

As far as performance goes, the Radeon R9 290 should theoretically be much better than the Radeon HD 7850 in general. (explain)

Radeon R9 290		320000 MB/sec
Radeon HD 7850		153600 MB/sec
	Difference: 166400 (108%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon R9 290 will be a lot (more or less 133%) better at anisotropic filtering than the Radeon HD 7850. (explain)

Radeon R9 290		128000 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 7850		55040 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 72960 (133%)

Pixel Rate

If running with lots of anti-aliasing 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 7850		27520 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 23680 (86%)

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 transported across the external memory interface within a second. It's worked out by multiplying the bus width by the speed of its memory. In the case of DDR RAM, the result should be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The better the card's memory bandwidth, the faster 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 can be processed per second. This figure is calculated by multiplying the total texture units of the card 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 per second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels the video card could possibly record to its local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is worked out by multiplying the number of colour ROPs by the the card's clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also called Render Output Units) are responsible for filling the screen with pixels (the image). The actual pixel fill rate also depends on quite a few other factors, especially the memory bandwidth - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the potential to reach the max fill rate.