Radeon R9 290 vs Radeon RX 590

Intro

Compare those specifications to the Radeon RX 590, which comes with a GPU core clock speed of 1469 MHz, and 8192 MB of GDDR5 RAM set to run at 2000 MHz through a 256-bit bus. It also is made up of 2304 SPUs, 144 Texture Address Units, and 32 Raster Operation Units.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon RX 590		175 Watts
Radeon R9 290		300 Watts
	Difference: 125 Watts (71%)

Memory Bandwidth

The Radeon R9 290 should in theory be a lot faster than the Radeon RX 590 in general. (explain)

Radeon R9 290		320000 MB/sec
Radeon RX 590		262144 MB/sec
	Difference: 57856 (22%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon RX 590 should be quite a bit (approximately 65%) better at AF than the Radeon R9 290. (explain)

Radeon RX 590		211536 Mtexels/sec
Radeon R9 290		128000 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 83536 (65%)

Pixel Rate

If running with a high resolution is important to you, then the Radeon R9 290 is a better choice, not by a very large margin though. (explain)

Radeon R9 290		51200 Mpixels/sec
Radeon RX 590		47008 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 4192 (9%)

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 information (counted in megabytes per second) that can be transferred over the external memory interface in a second. It's calculated by multiplying the card's interface width by its memory speed. If it uses DDR memory, it should be multiplied by 2 once again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The better the card's memory bandwidth, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, HDR and high resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum amount of texture map elements (texels) that are processed in one second. This figure is worked out by multiplying the total texture units of the card 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 in a second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum number of pixels the graphics card can possibly write to its local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is calculated by multiplying the number of colour ROPs by the the core speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - sometimes also referred to as Render Output Units) are responsible for drawing the pixels (image) on the screen. The actual pixel output rate is also dependant on quite a few other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the potential to reach the max fill rate.