Radeon HD 7770 vs Radeon R9 290

Intro

Compare those specs to the Radeon R9 290, which comes with GPU clock speed of 800 MHz, and 4096 MB of GDDR5 RAM set to run at 1250 MHz through a 512-bit bus. It also is comprised of 2560 SPUs, 160 Texture Address Units, 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 7770		3180 points
	Difference: 6696 (211%)

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon HD 7770		80 Watts
Radeon R9 290		300 Watts
	Difference: 220 Watts (275%)

Memory Bandwidth

The Radeon R9 290, in theory, should be quite a bit faster than the Radeon HD 7770 overall. (explain)

Radeon R9 290		320000 MB/sec
Radeon HD 7770		72000 MB/sec
	Difference: 248000 (344%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon R9 290 should be a lot (about 220%) better at anisotropic filtering than the Radeon HD 7770. (explain)

Radeon R9 290		128000 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 7770		40000 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 88000 (220%)

Pixel Rate

If using lots of anti-aliasing is important to you, then the Radeon R9 290 is the winner, by far. (explain)

Radeon R9 290		51200 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 7770		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 (in units of megabytes per second) that can be transferred past the external memory interface in one second. It's worked out by multiplying the interface width by its memory speed. In the case of DDR memory, the result should be multiplied by 2 again. If DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The higher the card's memory bandwidth, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, HDR and high resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum number of texture map elements (texels) that are applied in one second. This number is worked out by multiplying the total texture units of the card by the core clock speed of the chip. The better the texel rate, the better the video 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 most pixels the video card could possibly record to the local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is worked out by multiplying the amount of ROPs by the the core speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - sometimes also referred to as Render Output Units) are responsible for drawing the pixels (image) on the screen. The actual pixel output rate also depends on quite a few other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the ability to reach the max fill rate.