Radeon HD 7950 3GB vs Radeon R9 270

Intro

Compare those specs to the Radeon R9 270, which comes with a core clock frequency of 900 MHz and a GDDR5 memory frequency of 1400 MHz. It also makes use of a 256-bit bus, and makes use of a 28 nm design. It is made up of 1280 SPUs, 80 Texture Address Units, and 32 Raster Operation 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

As far as performance goes, the Radeon HD 7950 3GB should in theory be a lot superior to the Radeon R9 270 overall. (explain)

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

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 7950 3GB will be much (more or less 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

If using a high resolution is important to you, then the Radeon R9 270 is the winner, but only just. (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 information (measured in megabytes per second) that can be moved over the external memory interface within a second. It's calculated by multiplying the interface width by the speed of its memory. If the card has DDR RAM, it must be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The higher the card's memory bandwidth, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, HDR and higher screen resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum amount of texture map elements (texels) that are processed in one second. This number is worked out by multiplying the total amount of texture units by the core speed of the chip. The higher this number, the better the 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 maximum number of pixels the video card can possibly record to the 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 clock speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also sometimes 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 of the card - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the ability to get to the maximum fill rate.