Radeon HD 7950 vs Radeon R9 290

Intro

Compare all that to the Radeon R9 290, which features a GPU core clock speed of 800 MHz, and 4096 MB of GDDR5 RAM running at 1250 MHz through a 512-bit bus. It also features 2560 SPUs, 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 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

The Radeon R9 290 should in theory perform much faster than the Radeon HD 7950 overall. (explain)

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

Texel Rate

The Radeon R9 290 is a lot (more or less 43%) more effective at texture filtering than the Radeon HD 7950. (explain)

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

Pixel Rate

The Radeon R9 290 is quite a bit (approximately 100%) more effective at AA than the Radeon HD 7950, and also should be able to handle higher resolutions without losing too much performance. (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 (counted in MB per second) that can be transported across the external memory interface in a second. It's calculated by multiplying the card's bus width by its memory speed. If the card has DDR RAM, the result should be multiplied by 2 once again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher the memory bandwidth, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, High Dynamic Range and high resolutions.

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

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels the video 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 clock speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - aka Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel fill rate is also dependant on many other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the ability to reach the maximum fill rate.