Radeon HD 6990 vs Radeon R9 290X

Intro

Compare all of that to the Radeon R9 290X, which comes with a GPU core clock speed of 800 MHz, and 4096 MB of GDDR5 memory set to run at 1250 MHz through a 512-bit bus. It also is comprised of 2816 Stream Processors, 176 TAUs, and 64 Raster Operation Units.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

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 290X		10609 points
Radeon HD 6990		5820 points
	Difference: 4789 (82%)

Ethereum Mining Hash Rate

Radeon R9 290X		29 Mh/s
Radeon HD 6990		24 Mh/s
	Difference: 5 (21%)

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon R9 290X		300 Watts
Radeon HD 6990		375 Watts
	Difference: 75 Watts (25%)

Memory Bandwidth

Both cards have the exact same bandwidth, so in theory they should have identical performance. (explain)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 6990 is a little bit (more or less 13%) faster with regards to texture filtering than the Radeon R9 290X. (explain)

Radeon HD 6990		159360 Mtexels/sec
Radeon R9 290X		140800 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 18560 (13%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon HD 6990 will be a small bit (more or less 4%) better at anti-aliasing than the Radeon R9 290X, and also able to handle higher screen resolutions while still performing well. (explain)

Radeon HD 6990		53120 Mpixels/sec
Radeon R9 290X		51200 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 1920 (4%)

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.

One or more cards in this comparison are multi-core. This means that their bandwidth, texel and pixel rates are theoretically doubled - this does not mean the card will actually perform twice as fast, but only that it should in theory be able to. Actual game benchmarks will give a more accurate idea of what it's capable of.

Price Comparison

Specifications

Memory Bandwidth: Memory bandwidth is the maximum amount of information (measured in MB per second) that can be transferred across the external memory interface within a second. It is calculated by multiplying the bus width by its memory clock speed. If the card has DDR type memory, it should be multiplied by 2 once again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The better the bandwidth is, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, HDR and high resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum texture map elements (texels) that can be processed per second. This figure is calculated by multiplying the total amount of texture units by the core clock speed of the chip. The higher the texel rate, the better the video card will be at texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels processed in one second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum number of pixels that the graphics chip can possibly record to the local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is calculated by multiplying the number of Raster Operations Pipelines by the the core speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - sometimes also referred to as Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel output rate is also dependant on lots of other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the ability to get to the maximum fill rate.