Radeon R9 290 vs Radeon RX 560

Intro

Compare all of that to the Radeon RX 560, which comes with GPU clock speed of 1175 MHz, and 4096 MB of GDDR5 memory set to run at 1750 MHz through a 128-bit bus. It also is comprised of 1024 Stream Processors, 64 Texture Address Units, and 16 Raster Operation Units.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon RX 560		80 Watts
Radeon R9 290		300 Watts
	Difference: 220 Watts (275%)

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically speaking, the Radeon R9 290 should perform much faster than the Radeon RX 560 overall. (explain)

Radeon R9 290		320000 MB/sec
Radeon RX 560		114688 MB/sec
	Difference: 205312 (179%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon R9 290 is a lot (about 70%) more effective at anisotropic filtering than the Radeon RX 560. (explain)

Radeon R9 290		128000 Mtexels/sec
Radeon RX 560		75200 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 52800 (70%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon R9 290 will be a lot (more or less 172%) faster with regards to AA than the Radeon RX 560, and will be capable of handling higher resolutions without losing too much performance. (explain)

Radeon R9 290		51200 Mpixels/sec
Radeon RX 560		18800 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 32400 (172%)

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 max amount of information (counted in megabytes per second) that can be transported across the external memory interface in a second. The number is worked out by multiplying the card's bus width by its memory clock speed. In the case of DDR RAM, it must be multiplied by 2 once again. If DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The better the memory bandwidth, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, High Dynamic Range and high resolutions.

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

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum amount of pixels the video card can possibly write to the local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is worked out by multiplying the amount of Raster Operations Pipelines by the the core clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also called Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel fill rate also depends on lots of other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the ability to get to the max fill rate.