Radeon R9 280X vs Radeon RX 590

Intro

Compare all that to the Radeon RX 590, which uses a 12 nm design. AMD has set the core frequency at 1469 MHz. The GDDR5 RAM works at a frequency of 2000 MHz on this specific card. 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 RX 590		175 Watts
Radeon R9 280X		250 Watts
	Difference: 75 Watts (43%)

Memory Bandwidth

The Radeon R9 280X, in theory, should perform a bit faster than the Radeon RX 590 in general. (explain)

Radeon R9 280X		288000 MB/sec
Radeon RX 590		262144 MB/sec
	Difference: 25856 (10%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon RX 590 will be much (about 94%) more effective at AF than the Radeon R9 280X. (explain)

Radeon RX 590		211536 Mtexels/sec
Radeon R9 280X		108800 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 102736 (94%)

Pixel Rate

If running with lots of anti-aliasing is important to you, then the Radeon RX 590 is a better choice, by a large margin. (explain)

Radeon RX 590		47008 Mpixels/sec
Radeon R9 280X		27200 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 19808 (73%)

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 largest amount of information (counted in MB per second) that can be transported over the external memory interface in a second. It is worked out by multiplying the interface width by the speed of its memory. If the card has DDR memory, it should be multiplied by 2 once again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The better the bandwidth is, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, High Dynamic Range and higher screen resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum number of texture map elements (texels) that are processed in one second. This figure is calculated by multiplying the total number of texture units of the card by the core speed of the chip. The better this number, the better the video card will be at texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels applied in one second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels that the graphics chip can possibly write to its local memory per 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 - aka Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel output rate is also dependant on quite a few other factors, especially the memory bandwidth - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the ability to reach the maximum fill rate.