Radeon R9 280 vs Radeon RX 590

Intro

Compare all of that 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 is set to run at a speed of 2000 MHz on this model. It features 2304 SPUs as well as 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 280		250 Watts
	Difference: 75 Watts (43%)

Memory Bandwidth

As far as performance goes, the Radeon RX 590 should in theory be a little bit superior to the Radeon R9 280 in general. (explain)

Radeon RX 590		262144 MB/sec
Radeon R9 280		240000 MB/sec
	Difference: 22144 (9%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon RX 590 should be a lot (more or less 102%) faster with regards to anisotropic filtering than the Radeon R9 280. (explain)

Radeon RX 590		211536 Mtexels/sec
Radeon R9 280		104496 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 107040 (102%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon RX 590 is quite a bit (about 57%) faster with regards to anti-aliasing than the Radeon R9 280, and able to handle higher resolutions more effectively. (explain)

Radeon RX 590		47008 Mpixels/sec
Radeon R9 280		29856 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 17152 (57%)

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: Memory bandwidth is the maximum amount of data (in units of MB per second) that can be moved over the external memory interface in a second. It's calculated by multiplying the card's interface width by its memory speed. If it uses DDR memory, it should be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher the bandwidth is, 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 amount of texture map elements (texels) that can be applied in one second. This figure is calculated by multiplying the total amount of texture units of the card 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 in one second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels the video card could possibly write to its local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is worked out by multiplying the number of ROPs by the the card's clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - sometimes also referred to as 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, especially the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the ability to reach the maximum fill rate.