Radeon HD 7950 vs Radeon R9 290

Intro

Compare all of that to the Radeon R9 290, which makes use of a 28 nm design. AMD has clocked the core speed at 800 MHz. The GDDR5 RAM is set to run at a speed of 1250 MHz on this model. It features 2560 SPUs along with 160 Texture Address Units and 64 ROPs.

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 290		9876 points
Radeon HD 7950		7731 points
	Difference: 2145 (28%)

Zcash Mining Hash Rate

Radeon R9 290		283 Sol/s
Radeon HD 7950		235 Sol/s
	Difference: 48 (20%)

Ethereum Mining Hash Rate

Radeon R9 290		29 Mh/s
Radeon HD 7950		21 Mh/s
	Difference: 8 (38%)

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

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

Memory Bandwidth

As far as performance goes, the Radeon R9 290 should in theory be a lot better than the Radeon HD 7950 in general. (explain)

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

Texel Rate

The Radeon R9 290 should be quite a bit (approximately 43%) better at anisotropic filtering than the Radeon HD 7950. (explain)

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

Pixel Rate

If running with a high resolution is important to you, then the Radeon R9 290 is superior to the Radeon HD 7950, and very much so. (explain)

Radeon R9 290		51200 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 7950		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: Memory bandwidth is the largest amount of information (measured in megabytes per second) that can be transferred across the external memory interface within a second. It's calculated by multiplying the interface width by its memory clock speed. If it uses DDR RAM, the result should be multiplied by 2 again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher the card's memory bandwidth, 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 are applied in one second. This number is worked out by multiplying the total amount of texture units by the core clock speed of the chip. The better the texel rate, the better the card will be at 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 that the graphics card could possibly write to its local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is calculated by multiplying the amount of Raster Operations Pipelines by the the core clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also called Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel fill rate also depends on many other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the ability to reach the max fill rate.