Radeon HD 7950 vs Radeon R9 285

Intro

Compare all that to the Radeon R9 285, which comes with a core clock frequency of 918 MHz and a GDDR5 memory frequency of 1375 MHz. It also uses a 256-bit bus, and uses a 28 nm design. It is comprised of 1792 SPUs, 112 Texture Address Units, and 32 Raster Operation 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 R9 285		8500 points
Radeon HD 7950		7731 points
	Difference: 769 (10%)

Ethereum Mining Hash Rate

Radeon HD 7950		21 Mh/s
Radeon R9 285		18 Mh/s
	Difference: 3 (17%)

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon R9 285		190 Watts
Radeon HD 7950		200 Watts
	Difference: 10 Watts (5%)

Memory Bandwidth

The Radeon HD 7950 should in theory perform much faster than the Radeon R9 285 in general. (explain)

Radeon HD 7950		240000 MB/sec
Radeon R9 285		176000 MB/sec
	Difference: 64000 (36%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon R9 285 will be a small bit (about 15%) faster with regards to anisotropic filtering than the Radeon HD 7950. (explain)

Radeon R9 285		102816 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 7950		89600 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 13216 (15%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon R9 285 will be a little bit (more or less 15%) more effective at anti-aliasing than the Radeon HD 7950, and should be capable of handling higher resolutions without losing too much performance. (explain)

Radeon R9 285		29376 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 7950		25600 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 3776 (15%)

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 MB per second) that can be moved over the external memory interface within a second. The number is worked out by multiplying the card's bus width by its memory speed. If it uses DDR type RAM, it must be multiplied by 2 once again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher the bandwidth is, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, HDR and high resolutions.

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

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum number of pixels that the graphics card can possibly write to its local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is calculated by multiplying the number of Render Output Units by the the card's clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also sometimes called Render Output Units) are responsible for filling the screen with pixels (the image). The actual pixel output rate also depends on many other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the potential to get to the maximum fill rate.