Radeon R9 290X vs Radeon RX 590

Intro

Compare all that to the Radeon RX 590, which has GPU clock speed of 1469 MHz, and 8192 MB of GDDR5 RAM running at 2000 MHz through a 256-bit bus. It also features 2304 Stream Processors, 144 TAUs, 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 290X		300 Watts
	Difference: 125 Watts (71%)

Memory Bandwidth

Performance-wise, the Radeon R9 290X should theoretically be much better than the Radeon RX 590 overall. (explain)

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

Texel Rate

The Radeon RX 590 will be a lot (approximately 50%) better at AF than the Radeon R9 290X. (explain)

Radeon RX 590		211536 Mtexels/sec
Radeon R9 290X		140800 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 70736 (50%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon R9 290X will be a little bit (approximately 9%) better at FSAA than the Radeon RX 590, and able to handle higher resolutions more effectively. (explain)

Radeon R9 290X		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: Bandwidth is the maximum amount of information (counted in MB per second) that can be transported past the external memory interface in a second. It's worked out by multiplying the bus width by its memory speed. If it uses DDR RAM, it should be multiplied by 2 once again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The higher the card's memory bandwidth, the better 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 per second. This is calculated by multiplying the total amount of texture units by the core speed of the chip. The better this number, the better the graphics card will be at handling texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels in one second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels that the graphics card can possibly write to the local memory in one 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 sometimes called Render Output Units) are responsible for drawing the pixels (image) on the screen. The actual pixel output rate is also dependant on lots of other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to get to the maximum fill rate.