Radeon HD 7950 3GB vs Radeon R9 270

Intro

Compare all of that to the Radeon R9 270, which uses a 28 nm design. AMD has set the core speed at 900 MHz. The GDDR5 memory works at a speed of 1400 MHz on this particular card. It features 1280 SPUs as well as 80 TAUs and 32 Rasterization Operator Units.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon R9 270		150 Watts
Radeon HD 7950 3GB		200 Watts
	Difference: 50 Watts (33%)

Memory Bandwidth

The Radeon HD 7950 3GB should in theory be quite a bit faster than the Radeon R9 270 in general. (explain)

Radeon HD 7950 3GB		240000 MB/sec
Radeon R9 270		179200 MB/sec
	Difference: 60800 (34%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 7950 3GB should be quite a bit (approximately 24%) more effective at anisotropic filtering than the Radeon R9 270. (explain)

Radeon HD 7950 3GB		89600 Mtexels/sec
Radeon R9 270		72000 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 17600 (24%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon R9 270 will be a little bit (approximately 13%) faster with regards to AA than the Radeon HD 7950 3GB, and also should be able to handle higher screen resolutions while still performing well. (explain)

Radeon R9 270		28800 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 7950 3GB		25600 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 3200 (13%)

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 largest amount of data (measured in MB per second) that can be transported past the external memory interface in one second. The number is calculated by multiplying the card's interface width by its memory speed. If the card has DDR type RAM, it should be multiplied by 2 again. If DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The better the 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 in one second. This is worked out by multiplying the total number of texture units by the core speed of the chip. The better this number, the better the graphics card will be at texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels in a second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels that the graphics chip could possibly write to the local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is calculated by multiplying the number of Raster Operations Pipelines by the the core speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - aka Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel fill rate is also dependant on quite a few other factors, especially the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the potential to reach the max fill rate.