Radeon R7 260X vs Radeon R9 290

Intro

Compare that to the Radeon R9 290, which comes with GPU clock speed of 800 MHz, and 4096 MB of GDDR5 RAM set to run at 1250 MHz through a 512-bit bus. It also is comprised of 2560 Stream Processors, 160 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 290		9876 points
Radeon R7 260X		4381 points
	Difference: 5495 (125%)

Ethereum Mining Hash Rate

Radeon R9 290		29 Mh/s
Radeon R7 260X		14 Mh/s
	Difference: 15 (107%)

Zcash Mining Hash Rate

Radeon R9 290		283 Sol/s
Radeon R7 260X		95 Sol/s
	Difference: 188 (198%)

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon R7 260X		115 Watts
Radeon R9 290		300 Watts
	Difference: 185 Watts (161%)

Memory Bandwidth

The Radeon R9 290 should in theory perform quite a bit faster than the Radeon R7 260X overall. (explain)

Radeon R9 290		320000 MB/sec
Radeon R7 260X		104000 MB/sec
	Difference: 216000 (208%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon R9 290 is quite a bit (more or less 108%) better at anisotropic filtering than the Radeon R7 260X. (explain)

Radeon R9 290		128000 Mtexels/sec
Radeon R7 260X		61600 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 66400 (108%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon R9 290 is a lot (about 191%) more effective at anti-aliasing than the Radeon R7 260X, and will be able to handle higher screen resolutions without losing too much performance. (explain)

Radeon R9 290		51200 Mpixels/sec
Radeon R7 260X		17600 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 33600 (191%)

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 (measured in MB per second) that can be transported over the external memory interface in a second. It's calculated by multiplying the interface width by its memory clock speed. If it uses DDR memory, the result 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 AA, HDR and higher screen resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum texture map elements (texels) that can be processed per second. This 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 video card will be at handling texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels processed in a second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum number of pixels the video card could possibly write to the 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 clock speed. 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 rate also depends on quite a few other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the ability to reach the maximum fill rate.