Radeon R9 270 vs Radeon RX 590

Intro

Compare all that to the Radeon RX 590, which has core clock speeds of 1469 MHz on the GPU, and 2000 MHz on the 8192 MB of GDDR5 RAM. It features 2304 SPUs as well as 144 TAUs and 32 Rasterization Operator Units.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon R9 270		150 Watts
Radeon RX 590		175 Watts
	Difference: 25 Watts (17%)

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically speaking, the Radeon RX 590 is 46% faster than the Radeon R9 270 overall, due to its higher data rate. (explain)

Radeon RX 590		262144 MB/sec
Radeon R9 270		179200 MB/sec
	Difference: 82944 (46%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon RX 590 will be quite a bit (about 194%) more effective at AF than the Radeon R9 270. (explain)

Radeon RX 590		211536 Mtexels/sec
Radeon R9 270		72000 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 139536 (194%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon RX 590 is much (about 63%) more effective at full screen anti-aliasing than the Radeon R9 270, and also will be able to handle higher resolutions without slowing down too much. (explain)

Radeon RX 590		47008 Mpixels/sec
Radeon R9 270		28800 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 18208 (63%)

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 (in units of megabytes per second) that can be moved over the external memory interface within a second. It's calculated by multiplying the interface width by the speed of its memory. If it uses DDR memory, the result should be multiplied by 2 once 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 anti-aliasing, High Dynamic Range and higher screen resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum texture map elements (texels) that are applied per second. This number is worked out by multiplying the total amount of texture units of the card by the core 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 processed in a second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum number of pixels that the graphics card could possibly record to its local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is worked out by multiplying the number of colour ROPs by the clock speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also called Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel 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 potential to reach the max fill rate.