Radeon R9 285 vs Radeon R9 290X

Intro

Compare all that to the Radeon R9 290X, which has 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 made up of 2816 Stream Processors, 176 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 290X		10609 points
Radeon R9 285		8500 points
	Difference: 2109 (25%)

Ethereum Mining Hash Rate

Radeon R9 290X		29 Mh/s
Radeon R9 285		18 Mh/s
	Difference: 11 (61%)

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon R9 285		190 Watts
Radeon R9 290X		300 Watts
	Difference: 110 Watts (58%)

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically speaking, the Radeon R9 290X should be a lot faster than the Radeon R9 285 in general. (explain)

Radeon R9 290X		320000 MB/sec
Radeon R9 285		176000 MB/sec
	Difference: 144000 (82%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon R9 290X is a lot (approximately 37%) faster with regards to texture filtering than the Radeon R9 285. (explain)

Radeon R9 290X		140800 Mtexels/sec
Radeon R9 285		102816 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 37984 (37%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon R9 290X is much (about 74%) more effective at anti-aliasing than the Radeon R9 285, and capable of handling higher screen resolutions better. (explain)

Radeon R9 290X		51200 Mpixels/sec
Radeon R9 285		29376 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 21824 (74%)

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 (measured in megabytes per second) that can be transferred over the external memory interface within a second. The number is worked out by multiplying the card's interface width by the speed of its memory. In the case of DDR memory, it should be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The higher the bandwidth is, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, High Dynamic Range and high resolutions.

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

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum number of pixels the video card can possibly write to its local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is calculated by multiplying the amount of ROPs by the the core speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - aka Render Output Units) are responsible for drawing the pixels (image) on the screen. The actual pixel rate also depends on many other factors, especially the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to reach the max fill rate.