AMD Radeon R9 290 vs AMD Radeon HD 7970

VS

We compared two Desktop platform GPUs: 4GB VRAM Radeon R9 290 and 3GB VRAM Radeon HD 7970 to see which GPU has better performance in key specifications, benchmark tests, power consumption, etc.

Main Differences

AMD Radeon R9 290 's Advantages

Released 1 years and 11 months late

More VRAM (4GB vs 3GB)

Larger VRAM bandwidth (320.0GB/s vs 264.0GB/s)

512 additional rendering cores

AMD Radeon HD 7970 's Advantages

Lower TDP (250W vs 275W)

Score

Benchmark

FP32 (float)

Radeon R9 290 +27%

4.849 TFLOPS

Radeon HD 7970

3.789 TFLOPS

3DMark Time Spy

Radeon R9 290 +61%

3681

Radeon HD 7970

2279

Radeon R9 290

VS

Radeon HD 7970

Graphics Card

Nov 2013

Release Date

Dec 2011

Volcanic Islands

Generation

Southern Islands

Desktop

Type

Desktop

PCIe 3.0 x16

Bus Interface

PCIe 3.0 x16

Clock Speeds

-

Base Clock

-

Boost Clock

-

1250 MHz

Memory Clock

1375 MHz

Memory

4GB

Memory Size

3GB

GDDR5

Memory Type

GDDR5

512bit

Memory Bus

384bit

320.0GB/s

Bandwidth

264.0GB/s

Render Config

-

SM Count

-

40

Compute Units

32

2560

Shading Units

2048

160

TMUs

128

64

ROPs

32

-

Tensor Cores

-

RT Cores

-

16 KB (per CU)

L1 Cache

16 KB (per CU)

1024 KB

L2 Cache

768 KB

Theoretical Performance

60.61 GPixel/s

Pixel Rate

29.60 GPixel/s

151.5 GTexel/s

Texture Rate

118.4 GTexel/s

-

FP16 (half)

-

4.849 TFLOPS

FP32 (float)

3.789 TFLOPS

606.1 GFLOPS

FP64 (double)

947.2 GFLOPS

Graphics Processor

Hawaii

GPU Name

Tahiti

Hawaii PRO (215-0852020)

GPU Variant

Tahiti XT (215-0821060)

GCN 2.0

Architecture

GCN 1.0

TSMC

Foundry

TSMC

28 nm

Process Size

28 nm

6.2 billion

Transistors

4.313 billion

438 mm²

Die Size

352 mm²

Board Design

275W

TDP

250W

600 W

Suggested PSU

600 W

2x DVI 1x HDMI 1.4a 1x DisplayPort 1.2

Outputs

1x DVI 1x HDMI 1.4a 2x mini-DisplayPort 1.2

1x 6-pin + 1x 8-pin

Power Connectors

1x 6-pin + 1x 8-pin

Graphics Features

12 (12_0)

DirectX

12 (11_1)

4.6

OpenGL

4.6

2.0

OpenCL

1.2

Vulkan

1.2

-

CUDA

-

6.3

Shader Model

5.1

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