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Radeon HD 6990 vs Radeon R9 290

Intro

The Radeon HD 6990 makes use of a 40 nm design. AMD has set the core speed at 830 MHz. The GDDR5 memory runs at a speed of 1250 MHz on this specific model. It features 1536 SPUs as well as 96 Texture Address Units and 32 ROPs.

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

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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 HD 6990 5820 points
Difference: 4056 (70%)

Ethereum Mining Hash Rate

Radeon R9 290 29 Mh/s
Radeon HD 6990 24 Mh/s
Difference: 5 (21%)

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon R9 290 300 Watts
Radeon HD 6990 375 Watts
Difference: 75 Watts (25%)

Memory Bandwidth

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

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 6990 will be much (about 25%) faster with regards to anisotropic filtering than the Radeon R9 290. (explain)

Radeon HD 6990 159360 Mtexels/sec
Radeon R9 290 128000 Mtexels/sec
Difference: 31360 (25%)

Pixel Rate

If running with a high screen resolution is important to you, then the Radeon HD 6990 is a better choice, but only just. (explain)

Radeon HD 6990 53120 Mpixels/sec
Radeon R9 290 51200 Mpixels/sec
Difference: 1920 (4%)

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.

One or more cards in this comparison are multi-core. This means that their bandwidth, texel and pixel rates are theoretically doubled - this does not mean the card will actually perform twice as fast, but only that it should in theory be able to. Actual game benchmarks will give a more accurate idea of what it's capable of.

Price Comparison

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Radeon HD 6990

Amazon.com

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Radeon R9 290

Amazon.com

Check prices at:

Please note that the price comparisons are based on search keywords - sometimes it might show cards with very similar names that are not exactly the same as the one chosen in the comparison. We do try to filter out the wrong results as best we can, though.

Specifications

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Model Radeon HD 6990 Radeon R9 290
Manufacturer AMD AMD
Year March 2011 November 2013
Code Name Antilles Hawaii PRO
Memory 2048 MB (x2) 4096 MB
Core Speed 830 MHz (x2) 800 MHz
Memory Speed 5000 MHz (x2) 5000 MHz
Power (Max TDP) 375 watts 300 watts
Bandwidth 320000 MB/sec 320000 MB/sec
Texel Rate 159360 Mtexels/sec 128000 Mtexels/sec
Pixel Rate 53120 Mpixels/sec 51200 Mpixels/sec
Unified Shaders 1536 (x2) 2560
Texture Mapping Units 96 (x2) 160
Render Output Units 32 (x2) 64
Bus Type GDDR5 GDDR5
Bus Width 256-bit (x2) 512-bit
Fab Process 40 nm 28 nm
Transistors 2640 million 6200 million
Bus PCIe 2.1 x16 PCIe 3.0 x16
DirectX Version DirectX 11 DirectX 11.2
OpenGL Version OpenGL 4.1 OpenGL 4.3

Memory Bandwidth: Memory bandwidth is the max amount of data (in units of megabytes per second) that can be transported over the external memory interface within a second. The number is worked out by multiplying the card's bus width by its memory clock speed. In the case of DDR type RAM, it must be multiplied by 2 once again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The better the memory bandwidth, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, HDR and high resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum amount of texture map elements (texels) that are applied per second. This figure is calculated by multiplying the total texture units by the core 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 in one second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum number of pixels that the graphics card could possibly write to the local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is calculated by multiplying the number of Render Output Units by the the card's clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - sometimes also referred to as Render Output Units) are responsible for filling the screen with pixels (the image). 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 potential to get to the maximum fill rate.

Display Prices

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Radeon HD 6990

Amazon.com

Check prices at:

Radeon R9 290

Amazon.com

Check prices at:

Please note that the price comparisons are based on search keywords - sometimes it might show cards with very similar names that are not exactly the same as the one chosen in the comparison. We do try to filter out the wrong results as best we can, though.

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