Radeon RX 480 4GB vs Radeon RX 590

Intro

Compare those specifications to the Radeon RX 590, which makes use of a 12 nm design. AMD has clocked the core speed at 1469 MHz. The GDDR5 memory works at a frequency of 2000 MHz on this specific card. It features 2304 SPUs along with 144 Texture Address Units and 32 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon RX 480 4GB		150 Watts
Radeon RX 590		175 Watts
	Difference: 25 Watts (17%)

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically speaking, the Radeon RX 590 is 14% faster than the Radeon RX 480 4GB in general, due to its greater data rate. (explain)

Radeon RX 590		262144 MB/sec
Radeon RX 480 4GB		229376 MB/sec
	Difference: 32768 (14%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon RX 590 should be much (approximately 31%) more effective at texture filtering than the Radeon RX 480 4GB. (explain)

Radeon RX 590		211536 Mtexels/sec
Radeon RX 480 4GB		161280 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 50256 (31%)

Pixel Rate

If using high levels of AA is important to you, then the Radeon RX 590 is a better choice, by a large margin. (explain)

Radeon RX 590		47008 Mpixels/sec
Radeon RX 480 4GB		35840 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 11168 (31%)

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 data (counted in megabytes per second) that can be transported over the external memory interface in one second. It's calculated by multiplying the bus width by its memory speed. If the card has DDR type RAM, it must be multiplied by 2 again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The better the memory bandwidth, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, HDR and higher screen resolutions.

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

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