Radeon R9 290 vs Radeon R9 290X

Intro

Compare those specifications to the Radeon R9 290X, which features core clock speeds of 800 MHz on the GPU, and 1250 MHz on the 4096 MB of GDDR5 RAM. It features 2816 SPUs along with 176 Texture Address Units and 64 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 R9 290X		10609 points
Radeon R9 290		9876 points
	Difference: 733 (7%)

Zcash Mining Hash Rate

Radeon R9 290X		369 Sol/s
Radeon R9 290		283 Sol/s
	Difference: 86 (30%)

Ethereum Mining Hash Rate

Radeon R9 290		29 Mh/s
Radeon R9 290X		29 Mh/s
	Difference: 0 (0%)

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Both cards have the same power consumption.

Memory Bandwidth

Both cards have exactly the same bandwidth, so in theory they should perform exactly the same. (explain)

Texel Rate

The Radeon R9 290X will be a little bit (approximately 10%) more effective at AF than the Radeon R9 290. (explain)

Radeon R9 290X		140800 Mtexels/sec
Radeon R9 290		128000 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 12800 (10%)

Pixel Rate

Both cards have exactly the same pixel fill rate, so theoretically they should perform equally good at at full screen anti-aliasing, and be capable of handling the same resolutions. (explain)

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 maximum amount of data (in units of MB per second) that can be transported over the external memory interface in one second. It's worked out by multiplying the card's interface width by the speed of its memory. In the case of DDR RAM, it must be multiplied by 2 again. If DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The higher the bandwidth is, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, HDR and higher screen resolutions.

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

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum number of pixels the graphics card can possibly record to its local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is calculated by multiplying the number of ROPs by the clock speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - aka Render Output Units) are responsible for drawing the pixels (image) on the screen. The actual pixel rate also depends on many other factors, especially the memory bandwidth - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the ability to reach the maximum fill rate.