Radeon R7 250 vs Radeon R9 285

Intro

Compare all that to the Radeon R9 285, which features a core clock frequency of 918 MHz and a GDDR5 memory speed of 1375 MHz. It also uses a 256-bit bus, and makes use of a 28 nm design. It is made up of 1792 SPUs, 112 Texture Address Units, and 32 Raster Operation Units.

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 285		8500 points
Radeon R7 250		1836 points
	Difference: 6664 (363%)

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon R7 250		65 Watts
Radeon R9 285		190 Watts
	Difference: 125 Watts (192%)

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically speaking, the Radeon R9 285 should be much faster than the Radeon R7 250 in general. (explain)

Radeon R9 285		176000 MB/sec
Radeon R7 250		73600 MB/sec
	Difference: 102400 (139%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon R9 285 will be much (approximately 328%) better at anisotropic filtering than the Radeon R7 250. (explain)

Radeon R9 285		102816 Mtexels/sec
Radeon R7 250		24000 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 78816 (328%)

Pixel Rate

If using a high screen resolution is important to you, then the Radeon R9 285 is the winner, by far. (explain)

Radeon R9 285		29376 Mpixels/sec
Radeon R7 250		8000 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 21376 (267%)

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 moved past the external memory interface in a second. The number is calculated by multiplying the card's bus width by the speed of its memory. In the case of DDR type RAM, it must be multiplied by 2 again. If DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The higher the card's memory bandwidth, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, High Dynamic Range and high resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum number of texture map elements (texels) that are processed per second. This figure is calculated by multiplying the total texture units of the card by the core speed of the chip. The higher this number, the better the 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 maximum amount of pixels that the graphics card can possibly record to the local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is calculated by multiplying the amount of ROPs 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 quite a few other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the potential to get to the maximum fill rate.