Radeon HD 7950 vs Radeon R9 270

Intro

Compare that to the Radeon R9 270, which makes use of a 28 nm design. AMD has set the core frequency at 900 MHz. The GDDR5 memory is set to run at a speed of 1400 MHz on this card. It features 1280 SPUs along with 80 TAUs and 32 Rasterization Operator Units.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

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 HD 7950		7731 points
Radeon R9 270		5943 points
	Difference: 1788 (30%)

Ethereum Mining Hash Rate

Radeon HD 7950		21 Mh/s
Radeon R9 270		15 Mh/s
	Difference: 6 (40%)

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

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

Memory Bandwidth

In theory, the Radeon HD 7950 is 34% quicker than the Radeon R9 270 overall, due to its greater bandwidth. (explain)

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

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 7950 will be much (about 24%) faster with regards to anisotropic filtering than the Radeon R9 270. (explain)

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

Pixel Rate

The Radeon R9 270 is just a bit (more or less 13%) better at AA than the Radeon HD 7950, and also should be able to handle higher resolutions while still performing well. (explain)

Radeon R9 270		28800 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 7950		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 max amount of information (counted in MB per second) that can be transferred over the external memory interface in one second. The number is calculated by multiplying the bus width by its memory clock speed. If the card has DDR RAM, it should be multiplied by 2 once again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The better the memory bandwidth, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, HDR and higher screen resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum number of texture map elements (texels) that are applied per second. This figure is worked out by multiplying the total number of texture units of the card by the core clock speed of the chip. The higher this number, the better the video 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 maximum number of pixels the video card can possibly record to the local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is calculated by multiplying the number of colour ROPs by the the core clock speed. 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 fill rate also depends on many other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the ability to get to the max fill rate.