Radeon RX 480 vs Radeon RX 590

Intro

Compare those specifications to the Radeon RX 590, which comes with a core clock speed of 1469 MHz and a GDDR5 memory frequency of 2000 MHz. It also makes use of a 256-bit bus, and uses a 12 nm design. It is made up of 2304 SPUs, 144 TAUs, and 32 Raster Operation Units.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

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

Memory Bandwidth

Both cards have exactly the same bandwidth, so in theory they should have identical performance. (explain)

Texel Rate

The Radeon RX 590 will be a lot (more or less 31%) faster with regards to AF than the Radeon RX 480. (explain)

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

Pixel Rate

If using a high screen resolution is important to you, then the Radeon RX 590 is the winner, by a large margin. (explain)

Radeon RX 590		47008 Mpixels/sec
Radeon RX 480		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 max amount of information (in units of megabytes per second) that can be moved past the external memory interface in one second. It's calculated by multiplying the bus width by its memory speed. In the case of DDR RAM, it should be multiplied by 2 once again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The better the bandwidth is, 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 number of texture map elements (texels) that are applied in one second. This number is worked out by multiplying the total amount of texture units by the core clock speed of the chip. The better 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 a second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum number of pixels the graphics card could possibly record to its local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is calculated by multiplying the number of Render Output Units by the the core speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also 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, especially the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the ability to get to the max fill rate.