Radeon HD 7950 3GB vs Radeon R9 290

Intro

Compare all that to the Radeon R9 290, which uses a 28 nm design. AMD has clocked the core speed at 800 MHz. The GDDR5 RAM runs at a frequency of 1250 MHz on this particular card. 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.

Zcash Mining Hash Rate

Radeon R9 290		283 Sol/s
Radeon HD 7950 3GB		229 Sol/s
	Difference: 54 (24%)

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon HD 7950 3GB		200 Watts
Radeon R9 290		300 Watts
	Difference: 100 Watts (50%)

Memory Bandwidth

Performance-wise, the Radeon R9 290 should theoretically be quite a bit superior to the Radeon HD 7950 3GB overall. (explain)

Radeon R9 290		320000 MB/sec
Radeon HD 7950 3GB		240000 MB/sec
	Difference: 80000 (33%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon R9 290 will be a lot (approximately 43%) faster with regards to anisotropic filtering than the Radeon HD 7950 3GB. (explain)

Radeon R9 290		128000 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 7950 3GB		89600 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 38400 (43%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon R9 290 will be a lot (more or less 100%) more effective at AA than the Radeon HD 7950 3GB, and also capable of handling higher screen resolutions better. (explain)

Radeon R9 290		51200 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 7950 3GB		25600 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 25600 (100%)

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: Bandwidth is the maximum amount of data (counted in megabytes per second) that can be transferred 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 RAM, it must be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The better the memory bandwidth, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, High Dynamic Range and higher screen resolutions.

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

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels the graphics card can possibly write to its local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is worked out by multiplying the amount of colour ROPs by the the card's clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - sometimes also referred to as Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel output rate is also dependant on quite a few other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the ability to get to the maximum fill rate.