Radeon R7 260X vs Radeon R9 290

Intro

Compare all of that to the Radeon R9 290, which comes with a core clock speed of 800 MHz and a GDDR5 memory speed of 1250 MHz. It also features a 512-bit bus, and uses a 28 nm design. It is comprised of 2560 SPUs, 160 Texture Address Units, and 64 Raster Operation 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 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

Theoretically speaking, the Radeon R9 290 is 208% quicker than the Radeon R7 260X in general, because of its higher bandwidth. (explain)

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

Texel Rate

The Radeon R9 290 is much (about 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 should be much (more or less 191%) faster with regards to full screen anti-aliasing than the Radeon R7 260X, and also should be able to handle higher resolutions without slowing down too much. (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: Bandwidth is the max amount of information (counted in MB per second) that can be transferred past the external memory interface in a second. It's calculated by multiplying the card's bus width by its memory clock speed. If it uses DDR type RAM, the result should be multiplied by 2 again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher the bandwidth is, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, HDR and higher screen resolutions.

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

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels the graphics card could possibly write to its local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is calculated by multiplying the number of Render Output Units by the clock 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 many other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the ability to get to the maximum fill rate.