Radeon HD 7290 vs GeForce 8500 GT

General info

GPU architecture, market segment, value for money and other general parameters compared.

Place in performance ranking	not rated	not rated
Place by popularity	not in top-100	not in top-100
Architecture	Tesla (2006−2010)	Terascale 2 (2009−2015)
GPU code name	G86	Zacate
Market segment	Desktop	Laptop
Release date	17 April 2007 (17 years ago)	1 July 2011 (12 years ago)
Launch price (MSRP)	$129	no data
Current price	$231 (1.8x MSRP)	$160

Technical specs

General performance parameters such as number of shaders, GPU core base clock and boost clock speeds, manufacturing process, texturing and calculation speed. These parameters indirectly speak of performance, but for precise assessment you have to consider their benchmark and gaming test results. Note that power consumption of some graphics cards can well exceed their nominal TDP, especially when overclocked.

Pipelines / CUDA cores	16	80
Core clock speed	459 MHz	280 MHz
Boost clock speed	no data	400 MHz
Number of transistors	210 million	450 million
Manufacturing process technology	80 nm	40 nm
Power consumption (TDP)	30 Watt	18 Watt
Texture fill rate	3.6 billion/sec	3.200
Floating-point performance	29.376 gflops	no data

Size and compatibility

Information on GeForce 8500 GT and Radeon HD 7290 compatibility with other computer components. Useful when choosing a future computer configuration or upgrading an existing one. For desktop video cards it's interface and bus (motherboard compatibility), additional power connectors (power supply compatibility). For notebook video cards it's notebook size, connection slot and bus, if the video card is inserted into a slot instead of being soldered to the notebook motherboard.

Interface	PCIe 1.0 x16	IGP
Length	229 mm	no data
Width	1-slot	no data
Supplementary power connectors	None	no data
SLI options	+	no data

Memory

Parameters of VRAM installed: its type, size, bus, clock and resulting bandwidth. Integrated GPUs have no dedicated video RAM and use a shared part of system RAM.

Memory type	GDDR3	System Shared
Maximum RAM amount	256 MB	System Shared
Standard memory config per GPU	256 MB	no data
Memory bus width	128 Bit	System Shared
Memory clock speed	800 MHz	System Shared
Memory bandwidth	12.8 GB/s	no data
Shared memory	no data	+

Video outputs and ports

Types and number of video connectors present on the reviewed GPUs. As a rule, data in this section is precise only for desktop reference ones (so-called Founders Edition for NVIDIA chips). OEM manufacturers may change the number and type of output ports, while for notebook cards availability of certain video outputs ports depends on the laptop model rather than on the card itself.

Display Connectors

1x DVI, 1x VGA, 1x S-Video

No outputs

API support

List of supported graphics and general-purpose computing APIs, including their specific versions.

DirectX	11.1 (10_0)	11.2 (11_0)
Shader Model	4.0	5.0
OpenGL	2.1	4.4
OpenCL	1.1	1.2
Vulkan	N/A	N/A
CUDA	1.1	no data

Synthetic benchmark performance

Non-gaming benchmark performance comparison. The combined score is measured on a 0-100 point scale.

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Advantages and disadvantages

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Recency	17 April 2007	1 July 2011
Maximum RAM amount	256 MB	System Shared
Chip lithography	80 nm	40 nm
Power consumption (TDP)	30 Watt	18 Watt

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