Radeon R9 290 vs Radeon RX 480

Intro

Compare all of that to the Radeon RX 480, which features a GPU core clock speed of 1120 MHz, and 8192 MB of GDDR5 memory set to run at 2000 MHz through a 256-bit bus. It also features 2304 SPUs, 144 Texture Address Units, and 32 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 RX 480		13349 points
Radeon R9 290		9876 points
	Difference: 3473 (35%)

Zcash Mining Hash Rate

Radeon R9 290		283 Sol/s
Radeon RX 480		280 Sol/s
	Difference: 3 (1%)

Ethereum Mining Hash Rate

Radeon R9 290		29 Mh/s
Radeon RX 480		27 Mh/s
	Difference: 2 (7%)

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon RX 480		150 Watts
Radeon R9 290		300 Watts
	Difference: 150 Watts (100%)

Memory Bandwidth

Performance-wise, the Radeon R9 290 should in theory be a lot better than the Radeon RX 480 in general. (explain)

Radeon R9 290		320000 MB/sec
Radeon RX 480		262144 MB/sec
	Difference: 57856 (22%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon RX 480 should be quite a bit (about 26%) faster with regards to texture filtering than the Radeon R9 290. (explain)

Radeon RX 480		161280 Mtexels/sec
Radeon R9 290		128000 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 33280 (26%)

Pixel Rate

If running with lots of anti-aliasing is important to you, then the Radeon R9 290 is superior to the Radeon RX 480, by far. (explain)

Radeon R9 290		51200 Mpixels/sec
Radeon RX 480		35840 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 15360 (43%)

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 (counted in megabytes per second) that can be moved over the external memory interface in one second. It is calculated by multiplying the card's interface width by the speed of its memory. If it uses DDR type RAM, the result should be multiplied by 2 again. If DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The higher the card's 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 texture map elements (texels) that are applied in one 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 card will be at texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels processed per second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum amount of pixels the video card can possibly write to its local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is calculated by multiplying the number of colour ROPs by the the card's clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also sometimes called Render Output Units) are responsible for drawing the pixels (image) on the screen. The actual pixel rate also depends on lots of other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the ability to reach the maximum fill rate.