Radeon HD 7950 vs Radeon R9 290

Intro

Compare all of that to the Radeon R9 290, which makes use of a 28 nm design. AMD has clocked the core speed at 800 MHz. The GDDR5 memory runs at a speed of 1250 MHz on this specific card. It features 2560 SPUs as well as 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 7950		7731 points
	Difference: 2145 (28%)

Zcash Mining Hash Rate

Radeon R9 290		283 Sol/s
Radeon HD 7950		235 Sol/s
	Difference: 48 (20%)

Ethereum Mining Hash Rate

Radeon R9 290		29 Mh/s
Radeon HD 7950		21 Mh/s
	Difference: 8 (38%)

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon HD 7950		200 Watts
Radeon R9 290		300 Watts
	Difference: 100 Watts (50%)

Memory Bandwidth

The Radeon R9 290, in theory, should perform a lot faster than the Radeon HD 7950 in general. (explain)

Radeon R9 290		320000 MB/sec
Radeon HD 7950		240000 MB/sec
	Difference: 80000 (33%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon R9 290 is quite a bit (approximately 43%) more effective at anisotropic filtering than the Radeon HD 7950. (explain)

Radeon R9 290		128000 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 7950		89600 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 38400 (43%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon R9 290 should be a lot (about 100%) better at FSAA than the Radeon HD 7950, and also able to handle higher screen resolutions better. (explain)

Radeon R9 290		51200 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 7950		25600 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 25600 (100%)

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 data (counted in megabytes per second) that can be moved over the external memory interface in one second. It is calculated by multiplying the bus width by its memory speed. In the case of DDR RAM, it should be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The better the bandwidth is, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, High Dynamic Range and high resolutions.

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

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels that the graphics chip can possibly record to the local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is calculated by multiplying the number of ROPs by the the core speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also called Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel fill 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 potential to reach the max fill rate.