Radeon R9 295X2 vs Radeon RX 590

Intro

Compare that to the Radeon RX 590, which features a clock speed of 1469 MHz and a GDDR5 memory frequency of 2000 MHz. It also makes use of a 256-bit memory bus, and makes use of a 12 nm design. It is made up of 2304 SPUs, 144 Texture Address Units, and 32 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon RX 590		175 Watts
Radeon R9 295X2		500 Watts
	Difference: 325 Watts (186%)

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically, the Radeon R9 295X2 should perform quite a bit faster than the Radeon RX 590 overall. (explain)

Radeon R9 295X2		640000 MB/sec
Radeon RX 590		262144 MB/sec
	Difference: 377856 (144%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon R9 295X2 is quite a bit (about 69%) faster with regards to AF than the Radeon RX 590. (explain)

Radeon R9 295X2		358336 Mtexels/sec
Radeon RX 590		211536 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 146800 (69%)

Pixel Rate

If running with high levels of AA is important to you, then the Radeon R9 295X2 is a better choice, by far. (explain)

Radeon R9 295X2		130304 Mpixels/sec
Radeon RX 590		47008 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 83296 (177%)

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.

One or more cards in this comparison are multi-core. This means that their bandwidth, texel and pixel rates are theoretically doubled - this does not mean the card will actually perform twice as fast, but only that it should in theory be able to. Actual game benchmarks will give a more accurate idea of what it's capable of.

Price Comparison

Specifications

Memory Bandwidth: Bandwidth is the largest amount of information (in units of megabytes per second) that can be moved across the external memory interface in a second. The number is calculated by multiplying the card's bus width by its memory speed. In the case of DDR type memory, it must be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher the card's memory bandwidth, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, High Dynamic Range and high resolutions.

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

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum number of pixels the video card could possibly write to the local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is worked out by multiplying the amount of Render Output Units by the the core clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - aka Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel rate is also dependant on many other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the ability to get to the maximum fill rate.