Radeon R9 290 vs Radeon RX 6600 XT

Intro

Compare those specifications to the Radeon RX 6600 XT, which comes with core clock speeds of 1968 MHz on the GPU, and 2000 MHz on the 8192 MB of GDDR6 memory. It features 2048 SPUs along with 128 Texture Address Units and 64 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

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

Memory Bandwidth

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

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

Texel Rate

The Radeon RX 6600 XT is quite a bit (about 97%) more effective at anisotropic filtering than the Radeon R9 290. (explain)

Radeon RX 6600 XT		251904 Mtexels/sec
Radeon R9 290		128000 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 123904 (97%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon RX 6600 XT is a lot (more or less 146%) faster with regards to anti-aliasing than the Radeon R9 290, and also will be able to handle higher screen resolutions while still performing well. (explain)

Radeon RX 6600 XT		125952 Mpixels/sec
Radeon R9 290		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 max amount of information (measured in MB per second) that can be transferred past the external memory interface in one second. It's worked out by multiplying the interface width by the speed of its memory. If the card has DDR type memory, it should be multiplied by 2 once again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The better the 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 number of texture map elements (texels) that are applied in one second. This figure is worked out by multiplying the total amount of texture units by the core clock speed of the chip. The better this number, the better the video card will be at handling texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels applied in a second.

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