Radeon R9 270X vs Radeon R9 290X

Intro

Compare those specifications to the Radeon R9 290X, which makes use of a 28 nm design. AMD has set the core speed at 800 MHz. The GDDR5 memory works at a speed of 1250 MHz on this specific card. It features 2816 SPUs as well as 176 Texture Address Units and 64 Rasterization Operator 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 R9 270X		6590 points
	Difference: 4019 (61%)

Zcash Mining Hash Rate

Radeon R9 290X		369 Sol/s
Radeon R9 270X		177 Sol/s
	Difference: 192 (108%)

Ethereum Mining Hash Rate

Radeon R9 290X		29 Mh/s
Radeon R9 270X		18 Mh/s
	Difference: 11 (61%)

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon R9 270X		180 Watts
Radeon R9 290X		300 Watts
	Difference: 120 Watts (67%)

Memory Bandwidth

In theory, the Radeon R9 290X will be 79% quicker than the Radeon R9 270X in general, because of its higher data rate. (explain)

Radeon R9 290X		320000 MB/sec
Radeon R9 270X		179200 MB/sec
	Difference: 140800 (79%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon R9 290X will be quite a bit (about 76%) better at anisotropic filtering than the Radeon R9 270X. (explain)

Radeon R9 290X		140800 Mtexels/sec
Radeon R9 270X		80000 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 60800 (76%)

Pixel Rate

If running with a high screen resolution is important to you, then the Radeon R9 290X is the winner, by far. (explain)

Radeon R9 290X		51200 Mpixels/sec
Radeon R9 270X		32000 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 19200 (60%)

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 transported across the external memory interface in one second. It is calculated by multiplying the interface width by its memory speed. If it uses DDR type RAM, it must be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The better the memory bandwidth, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, HDR and higher screen resolutions.

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

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum amount of pixels that the graphics chip can possibly record to the local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is worked out by multiplying the amount 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 fill rate is also dependant on lots of other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the ability to reach the max fill rate.