Radeon R9 270 vs Radeon R9 290X

Intro

Compare those specifications to the Radeon R9 290X, 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 makes use of a 28 nm design. It is made up of 2816 SPUs, 176 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 290X		10609 points
Radeon R9 270		5943 points
	Difference: 4666 (79%)

Ethereum Mining Hash Rate

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

Memory Bandwidth

In theory, the Radeon R9 290X should perform quite a bit faster than the Radeon R9 270 in general. (explain)

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

Texel Rate

The Radeon R9 290X will be much (more or less 96%) better at AF than the Radeon R9 270. (explain)

Radeon R9 290X		140800 Mtexels/sec
Radeon R9 270		72000 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 68800 (96%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon R9 290X should be a lot (approximately 78%) faster with regards to anti-aliasing than the Radeon R9 270, and able to handle higher resolutions better. (explain)

Radeon R9 290X		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: Memory bandwidth is the largest amount of information (in units of MB per second) that can be moved past the external memory interface in one second. It is calculated by multiplying the card's bus width by its memory speed. If it uses DDR type RAM, it must be multiplied by 2 once again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The better the card's memory bandwidth, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, HDR and higher screen 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 number of texture units of the card by the core speed of the chip. The better the texel rate, the better the card will be at handling texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels per second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum amount of pixels that the graphics chip can possibly record to the local memory in one 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 - also sometimes called 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 potential to get to the maximum fill rate.