Radeon R9 270 vs Radeon RX 590

Intro

Compare all of that to the Radeon RX 590, which comes with core clock speeds of 1469 MHz on the GPU, and 2000 MHz on the 8192 MB of GDDR5 memory. 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 R9 270		150 Watts
Radeon RX 590		175 Watts
	Difference: 25 Watts (17%)

Memory Bandwidth

The Radeon RX 590 should theoretically be a lot faster than the Radeon R9 270 overall. (explain)

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

Texel Rate

The Radeon RX 590 is much (about 194%) better at anisotropic filtering 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 should be quite a bit (more or less 63%) faster with regards to anti-aliasing than the Radeon R9 270, and should be able to handle higher screen resolutions while still performing well. (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 information (in units of MB per second) that can be moved over the external memory interface in a second. The number is calculated by multiplying the bus width by its memory clock speed. In the case of DDR RAM, it must be multiplied by 2 once again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher the memory bandwidth, 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 amount of texture map elements (texels) that can be processed per 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 better the texel rate, the better the video card will be at handling texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels processed per second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum number of pixels that the graphics card could possibly write to its local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is calculated by multiplying the number of colour ROPs by the the core 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 output rate is also dependant on many other factors, especially the memory bandwidth - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to reach the max fill rate.