Radeon R9 290 vs Radeon RX 480

Intro

Compare all that to the Radeon RX 480, which has GPU core speed of 1120 MHz, and 8192 MB of GDDR5 RAM running at 2000 MHz through a 256-bit bus. It also is comprised of 2304 Stream Processors, 144 Texture Address Units, and 32 ROPs.

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 RX 480		13349 points
Radeon R9 290		9876 points
	Difference: 3473 (35%)

Zcash Mining Hash Rate

Radeon R9 290		283 Sol/s
Radeon RX 480		280 Sol/s
	Difference: 3 (1%)

Ethereum Mining Hash Rate

Radeon R9 290		29 Mh/s
Radeon RX 480		27 Mh/s
	Difference: 2 (7%)

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon RX 480		150 Watts
Radeon R9 290		300 Watts
	Difference: 150 Watts (100%)

Memory Bandwidth

Performance-wise, the Radeon R9 290 should in theory be a lot better than the Radeon RX 480 overall. (explain)

Radeon R9 290		320000 MB/sec
Radeon RX 480		262144 MB/sec
	Difference: 57856 (22%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon RX 480 is quite a bit (approximately 26%) better at anisotropic filtering than the Radeon R9 290. (explain)

Radeon RX 480		161280 Mtexels/sec
Radeon R9 290		128000 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 33280 (26%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon R9 290 is quite a bit (more or less 43%) faster with regards to AA than the Radeon RX 480, and also will be able to handle higher resolutions better. (explain)

Radeon R9 290		51200 Mpixels/sec
Radeon RX 480		35840 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 15360 (43%)

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: Bandwidth is the maximum amount of information (measured in MB per second) that can be transported past the external memory interface in a second. The number is worked out by multiplying the card's bus width by the speed of its memory. If it uses DDR memory, it must be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher the card's memory bandwidth, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, HDR and high resolutions.

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

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum amount of pixels that the graphics chip could possibly record to the local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is worked out by multiplying the number of Render Output Units by the the core speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also called Render Output Units) are responsible for filling the screen with pixels (the image). The actual pixel output rate is also dependant on quite a few other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to get to the max fill rate.