Radeon HD 7950 3GB vs Radeon R9 295X2

Intro

Compare all of that to the Radeon R9 295X2, which makes use of a 28 nm design. AMD has clocked the core frequency at 1018 MHz. The GDDR5 memory is set to run at a speed of 1250 MHz on this card. It features 2816 SPUs along with 176 Texture Address Units and 64 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon HD 7950 3GB		200 Watts
Radeon R9 295X2		500 Watts
	Difference: 300 Watts (150%)

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically speaking, the Radeon R9 295X2 will be 167% faster than the Radeon HD 7950 3GB in general, due to its higher data rate. (explain)

Radeon R9 295X2		640000 MB/sec
Radeon HD 7950 3GB		240000 MB/sec
	Difference: 400000 (167%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon R9 295X2 should be quite a bit (more or less 300%) more effective at AF than the Radeon HD 7950 3GB. (explain)

Radeon R9 295X2		358336 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 7950 3GB		89600 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 268736 (300%)

Pixel Rate

If using lots of anti-aliasing is important to you, then the Radeon R9 295X2 is a better choice, by far. (explain)

Radeon R9 295X2		130304 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 7950 3GB		25600 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 104704 (409%)

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.

One or more cards in this comparison are multi-core. This means that their bandwidth, texel and pixel rates are theoretically doubled - this does not mean the card will actually perform twice as fast, but only that it should in theory be able to. Actual game benchmarks will give a more accurate idea of what it's capable of.

Price Comparison

Specifications

Memory Bandwidth: Memory bandwidth is the maximum amount of data (counted in megabytes per second) that can be transported past the external memory interface in one second. It's calculated by multiplying the card's interface width by the speed of its memory. If it uses DDR RAM, it should be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The better 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 amount of texture map elements (texels) that can be applied in one 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 card will be at handling texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels per second.

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