Radeon R9 270X vs Radeon R9 290

Intro

Compare that to the Radeon R9 290, which uses a 28 nm design. AMD has set the core frequency at 800 MHz. The GDDR5 RAM works at a speed of 1250 MHz on this card. It features 2560 SPUs along with 160 Texture Address Units and 64 ROPs.

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 290		9876 points
Radeon R9 270X		6590 points
	Difference: 3286 (50%)

Zcash Mining Hash Rate

Radeon R9 290		283 Sol/s
Radeon R9 270X		177 Sol/s
	Difference: 106 (60%)

Ethereum Mining Hash Rate

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

Memory Bandwidth

In theory, the Radeon R9 290 should be quite a bit faster than the Radeon R9 270X overall. (explain)

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

Texel Rate

The Radeon R9 290 is a lot (about 60%) better at anisotropic filtering than the Radeon R9 270X. (explain)

Radeon R9 290		128000 Mtexels/sec
Radeon R9 270X		80000 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 48000 (60%)

Pixel Rate

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

Radeon R9 290		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: Bandwidth is the maximum amount of data (counted in megabytes per second) that can be transported across the external memory interface within a second. The number is worked out by multiplying the card's bus width by its memory clock speed. If the card has DDR memory, it should be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The better the bandwidth is, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, High Dynamic Range and higher screen resolutions.

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

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum number of pixels that the graphics card could possibly write to the local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is calculated by multiplying the amount of Raster Operations Pipelines by the the core clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - aka Render Output Units) are responsible for drawing the pixels (image) on the screen. The actual pixel output rate is also dependant on many other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the ability to reach the max fill rate.