Radeon R9 270 vs Radeon R9 290

Intro

Compare all of that to the Radeon R9 290, which comes with a clock speed of 800 MHz and a GDDR5 memory frequency of 1250 MHz. It also features a 512-bit bus, and makes use of a 28 nm design. It is comprised of 2560 SPUs, 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 270		5943 points
	Difference: 3933 (66%)

Ethereum Mining Hash Rate

Radeon R9 290		29 Mh/s
Radeon R9 270		15 Mh/s
	Difference: 14 (93%)

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon R9 270		150 Watts
Radeon R9 290		300 Watts
	Difference: 150 Watts (100%)

Memory Bandwidth

The Radeon R9 290 should theoretically be a lot faster than the Radeon R9 270 overall. (explain)

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

Texel Rate

The Radeon R9 290 will be quite a bit (about 78%) better at anisotropic filtering than the Radeon R9 270. (explain)

Radeon R9 290		128000 Mtexels/sec
Radeon R9 270		72000 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 56000 (78%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon R9 290 should be much (about 78%) faster with regards to anti-aliasing than the Radeon R9 270, and also should be able to handle higher screen resolutions while still performing well. (explain)

Radeon R9 290		51200 Mpixels/sec
Radeon R9 270		28800 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 22400 (78%)

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 largest amount of information (in units of MB per second) that can be transferred over the external memory interface in a second. The number is calculated by multiplying the interface width by its memory speed. In the case of DDR type RAM, the result should be multiplied by 2 once again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. 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 number of texture map elements (texels) that can be processed per second. This is worked out by multiplying the total number of texture units by the core speed of the chip. The better this number, the better the video card will be at texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels per second.

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