Radeon R7 260X vs Radeon RX 590

Intro

Compare all that to the Radeon RX 590, which comes with a clock speed of 1469 MHz and a GDDR5 memory frequency of 2000 MHz. It also features a 256-bit memory bus, and makes use of a 12 nm design. It is comprised of 2304 SPUs, 144 Texture Address Units, and 32 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon R7 260X		115 Watts
Radeon RX 590		175 Watts
	Difference: 60 Watts (52%)

Memory Bandwidth

In theory, the Radeon RX 590 is 152% faster than the Radeon R7 260X in general, because of its greater bandwidth. (explain)

Radeon RX 590		262144 MB/sec
Radeon R7 260X		104000 MB/sec
	Difference: 158144 (152%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon RX 590 will be quite a bit (about 243%) more effective at anisotropic filtering than the Radeon R7 260X. (explain)

Radeon RX 590		211536 Mtexels/sec
Radeon R7 260X		61600 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 149936 (243%)

Pixel Rate

If using a high screen resolution 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 R7 260X		17600 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 29408 (167%)

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 information (measured in megabytes per second) that can be moved past the external memory interface within a second. It is worked out by multiplying the card's bus width by the speed of its memory. In the case of DDR type RAM, it should be multiplied by 2 again. If DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The higher the bandwidth is, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, High Dynamic Range and high resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum amount of texture map elements (texels) that can be applied per second. This figure is worked out by multiplying the total number of texture units by the core speed of the chip. The higher this number, the better the graphics card will be at texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels applied in a second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum number of pixels that the graphics card could possibly record to the local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is calculated by multiplying the amount of Raster Operations Pipelines by the the card's clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - sometimes also referred to as Render Output Units) are responsible for filling the screen with pixels (the image). The actual pixel fill rate also depends on lots of other factors, especially the memory bandwidth - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the potential to get to the maximum fill rate.