Radeon HD 7850 vs Radeon R9 290

Intro

Compare those specs to the Radeon R9 290, which uses a 28 nm design. AMD has clocked the core speed at 800 MHz. The GDDR5 memory works at a speed of 1250 MHz on this particular card. It features 2560 SPUs along with 160 Texture Address Units and 64 Rasterization Operator Units.

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 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 a lot superior to 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 is 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 high levels of AA is important to you, then the Radeon R9 290 is superior to the Radeon HD 7850, 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: Memory bandwidth is the max amount of data (measured in megabytes per second) that can be transferred over the external memory interface in one second. It's calculated by multiplying the card's interface width by the speed of its memory. In the case of DDR type RAM, it must be multiplied by 2 once again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher the card's memory bandwidth, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, High Dynamic Range and high resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum amount of texture map elements (texels) that are 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 this number, 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 that the graphics card can possibly record to the local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is calculated by multiplying the number of Render Output Units by the the card's clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - aka Render Output Units) are responsible for filling the screen with pixels (the image). The actual pixel rate also depends on many other factors, especially the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the ability to reach the maximum fill rate.