Radeon R9 290X vs Radeon RX Vega 56

Intro

Compare those specs to the Radeon RX Vega 56, which makes use of a 14 nm design. AMD has clocked the core frequency at 1156 MHz. The HBM2 RAM is set to run at a speed of 1600 MHz on this model. It features 3584 SPUs along with 224 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 RX Vega 56		21011 points
Radeon R9 290X		10609 points
	Difference: 10402 (98%)

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon RX Vega 56		210 Watts
Radeon R9 290X		300 Watts
	Difference: 90 Watts (43%)

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically, the Radeon RX Vega 56 should be much faster than the Radeon R9 290X overall. (explain)

Radeon RX Vega 56		419430 MB/sec
Radeon R9 290X		320000 MB/sec
	Difference: 99430 (31%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon RX Vega 56 will be quite a bit (more or less 84%) better at anisotropic filtering than the Radeon R9 290X. (explain)

Radeon RX Vega 56		258944 Mtexels/sec
Radeon R9 290X		140800 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 118144 (84%)

Pixel Rate

If running with a high resolution is important to you, then the Radeon RX Vega 56 is superior to the Radeon R9 290X, by a large margin. (explain)

Radeon RX Vega 56		73984 Mpixels/sec
Radeon R9 290X		51200 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 22784 (45%)

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 maximum amount of data (measured in megabytes per second) that can be transported across the external memory interface in one second. It is worked out by multiplying the card's bus width by the speed of its memory. In the case of DDR type RAM, it must be multiplied by 2 again. If DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. 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 amount of texture map elements (texels) that can be applied in one second. This number is calculated by multiplying the total number of texture units by the core clock speed of the chip. The better the texel rate, the better the video 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 that the graphics chip could possibly write to the local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is calculated by multiplying the number of ROPs by the clock speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - aka Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel fill rate is also dependant on quite a few other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the ability to reach the max fill rate.