Radeon HD 7850 vs Radeon R9 290

Intro

Compare those specs to the Radeon R9 290, which uses a 28 nm design. AMD has clocked the core frequency at 800 MHz. The GDDR5 RAM runs at a speed of 1250 MHz on this specific model. It features 2560 SPUs along with 160 TAUs and 64 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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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 290		9876 points
Radeon HD 7850		5200 points
	Difference: 4676 (90%)

Zcash Mining Hash Rate

Radeon R9 290		283 Sol/s
Radeon HD 7850		171 Sol/s
	Difference: 112 (65%)

Ethereum Mining Hash Rate

Radeon R9 290		29 Mh/s
Radeon HD 7850		13 Mh/s
	Difference: 16 (123%)

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon HD 7850		130 Watts
Radeon R9 290		300 Watts
	Difference: 170 Watts (131%)

Memory Bandwidth

The Radeon R9 290 should in theory perform much faster than the Radeon HD 7850 overall. (explain)

Radeon R9 290		320000 MB/sec
Radeon HD 7850		153600 MB/sec
	Difference: 166400 (108%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon R9 290 will be a lot (about 133%) more effective at anisotropic filtering than the Radeon HD 7850. (explain)

Radeon R9 290		128000 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 7850		55040 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 72960 (133%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon R9 290 is a lot (about 86%) faster with regards to full screen anti-aliasing than the Radeon HD 7850, and also will be able to handle higher resolutions without losing too much performance. (explain)

Radeon R9 290		51200 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 7850		27520 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 23680 (86%)

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 (in units of MB per second) that can be transported past the external memory interface in one second. It is worked out by multiplying the card's interface width by the speed of its memory. If the card has DDR type memory, it must be multiplied by 2 once again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The higher the bandwidth is, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, HDR and high resolutions.

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

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels the video card can possibly write to the local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is worked out by multiplying the amount of Raster Operations Pipelines by the the core speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also called Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel rate is also dependant on lots of other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the ability to get to the max fill rate.