Radeon R9 290X vs Radeon RX 6600 XT

Intro

Compare those specifications to the Radeon RX 6600 XT, which makes use of a 7 nm design. AMD has clocked the core speed at 1968 MHz. The GDDR6 memory is set to run at a speed of 2000 MHz on this specific model. It features 2048 SPUs as well as 128 Texture Address Units and 64 ROPs.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon RX 6600 XT		160 Watts
Radeon R9 290X		300 Watts
	Difference: 140 Watts (88%)

Memory Bandwidth

The Radeon R9 290X should in theory be much faster than the Radeon RX 6600 XT in general. (explain)

Radeon R9 290X		320000 MB/sec
Radeon RX 6600 XT		262144 MB/sec
	Difference: 57856 (22%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon RX 6600 XT will be much (approximately 79%) faster with regards to anisotropic filtering than the Radeon R9 290X. (explain)

Radeon RX 6600 XT		251904 Mtexels/sec
Radeon R9 290X		140800 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 111104 (79%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon RX 6600 XT should be much (about 146%) more effective at AA than the Radeon R9 290X, and also capable of handling higher resolutions better. (explain)

Radeon RX 6600 XT		125952 Mpixels/sec
Radeon R9 290X		51200 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 74752 (146%)

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: Memory bandwidth is the largest amount of data (in units of megabytes per second) that can be moved across the external memory interface in a second. It is worked out by multiplying the interface width by the speed of its memory. In the case of DDR memory, it must be multiplied by 2 again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher the bandwidth is, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, High Dynamic Range and higher screen resolutions.

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

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum amount of pixels the video card could possibly record to its local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is calculated 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 drawing the pixels (image) on the screen. The actual pixel fill rate also depends on many other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to reach the max fill rate.