Radeon HD 6990 vs Radeon RX 590

Intro

Compare all that to the Radeon RX 590, which has a clock frequency of 1469 MHz and a GDDR5 memory speed of 2000 MHz. It also makes use of a 256-bit bus, and uses a 12 nm design. It is comprised of 2304 SPUs, 144 TAUs, 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 HD 6990		375 Watts
	Difference: 200 Watts (114%)

Memory Bandwidth

In theory, the Radeon HD 6990 should be 22% quicker than the Radeon RX 590 in general, because of its higher data rate. (explain)

Radeon HD 6990		320000 MB/sec
Radeon RX 590		262144 MB/sec
	Difference: 57856 (22%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon RX 590 should be quite a bit (about 33%) more effective at texture filtering than the Radeon HD 6990. (explain)

Radeon RX 590		211536 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 6990		159360 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 52176 (33%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon HD 6990 should be a little bit (approximately 13%) more effective at anti-aliasing than the Radeon RX 590, and also capable of handling higher resolutions while still performing well. (explain)

Radeon HD 6990		53120 Mpixels/sec
Radeon RX 590		47008 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 6112 (13%)

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.

One or more cards in this comparison are multi-core. This means that their bandwidth, texel and pixel rates are theoretically doubled - this does not mean the card will actually perform twice as fast, but only that it should in theory be able to. Actual game benchmarks will give a more accurate idea of what it's capable of.

Price Comparison

Specifications

Memory Bandwidth: Bandwidth is the max amount of data (in units of megabytes per second) that can be moved across the external memory interface in a second. The number is calculated by multiplying the card's bus width by its memory speed. If the card has DDR type RAM, the result should be multiplied by 2 again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The better the 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 processed in one second. This number is calculated by multiplying the total texture units of the card by the core speed of the chip. The higher the texel rate, the better the card will be at texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels in a second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels that the graphics chip can possibly record to its local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is worked out by multiplying the number of Render Output Units by the the card's clock speed. 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 is also dependant on lots of other factors, especially the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the potential to get to the max fill rate.