Radeon R9 290 vs Radeon RX 590

Intro

Compare those specifications to the Radeon RX 590, which has 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 features 2304 SPUs, 144 Texture Address Units, and 32 Raster Operation Units.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon RX 590		175 Watts
Radeon R9 290		300 Watts
	Difference: 125 Watts (71%)

Memory Bandwidth

The Radeon R9 290 should in theory perform a lot faster than the Radeon RX 590 overall. (explain)

Radeon R9 290		320000 MB/sec
Radeon RX 590		262144 MB/sec
	Difference: 57856 (22%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon RX 590 should be quite a bit (approximately 65%) better at texture filtering than the Radeon R9 290. (explain)

Radeon RX 590		211536 Mtexels/sec
Radeon R9 290		128000 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 83536 (65%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon R9 290 is a little bit (about 9%) better at anti-aliasing than the Radeon RX 590, and will be able to handle higher resolutions without slowing down too much. (explain)

Radeon R9 290		51200 Mpixels/sec
Radeon RX 590		47008 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 4192 (9%)

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 largest amount of data (counted in megabytes per second) that can be transported over the external memory interface in one second. It is calculated by multiplying the card's interface width by its memory speed. If it uses DDR type RAM, it must be multiplied by 2 again. If DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The higher the bandwidth is, the better 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 number is calculated 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 card will be at texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels applied per second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels the graphics card can possibly write to its local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is calculated by multiplying the number of ROPs by the clock speed of the card. 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 rate also depends on lots of other factors, especially the memory bandwidth - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the potential to reach the max fill rate.