In terms of overall gaming performance, the graphical capabilities of the AMD Radeon R9 290 Sapphire BF4 Edition are significantly better than the AMD Radeon HD 7870 DirectCU II 2GB Edition.

The HD 7870 has a 63 MHz higher core clock speed than the R9 290, but the R9 290 has 80 more Texture Mapping Units than the HD 7870. As a result, the R9 290 exhibits a 70.7 GTexel/s better Texture Fill Rate than the HD 7870. This still holds weight but shader performance is generally more relevant, particularly since both of these GPUs support at least DirectX 10.

The HD 7870 has a 63 MHz higher core clock speed than the R9 290, but the R9 290 has 32 more Render Output Units than the HD 7870. As a result, the R9 290 exhibits a 28.3 GPixel/s better Pixel Fill Rate than the HD 7870. However, both GPUs support DirectX 9 or above, and pixeling performance is only really relevant when comparing older cards.

The R9 290 was released over a year more recently than the HD 7870, and so the R9 290 is likely to have better driver support, meaning it will be more optimized for running the latest games when compared to the HD 7870.

Both GPUs exhibit very powerful performance, so it probably isn't worth upgrading from one to the other, as both are capable of running even the most demanding games at the highest settings.

The R9 290 has 2048 MB more video memory than the HD 7870, so is likely to be much better at displaying game textures at higher resolutions. This is supported by the fact that the R9 290 also has superior memory performance overall.

The R9 290 has 165.1 GB/sec greater memory bandwidth than the HD 7870, which means that the memory performance of the R9 290 is massively better than the HD 7870.

The Radeon R9 290 Sapphire BF4 Edition has 2560 Shader Processing Units and the Radeon HD 7870 DirectCU II 2GB Edition has 1280. However, the actual shader performance of the R9 290 is 2061 and the actual shader performance of the HD 7870 is 1099. The R9 290 having 962 better shader performance and an altogether better performance when taking into account other relevant data means that the R9 290 delivers a massively smoother and more efficient experience when processing graphical data than the HD 7870.

The Radeon R9 290 Sapphire BF4 Edition requires 275 Watts to run but there is no entry for the Radeon HD 7870 DirectCU II 2GB Edition. We would recommend a PSU with at least 750 Watts for the R9 290.