Radeon R9 290X vs Radeon RX 6600 XT

Intro

Compare those specs to the Radeon RX 6600 XT, which has a clock frequency of 1968 MHz and a GDDR6 memory frequency of 2000 MHz. It also uses a 128-bit memory bus, and uses a 7 nm design. It is made up of 2048 SPUs, 128 TAUs, and 64 Raster Operation Units.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon RX 6600 XT		160 Watts
Radeon R9 290X		300 Watts
	Difference: 140 Watts (88%)

Memory Bandwidth

As far as performance goes, the Radeon R9 290X should in theory be a lot better than the Radeon RX 6600 XT in general. (explain)

Radeon R9 290X		320000 MB/sec
Radeon RX 6600 XT		262144 MB/sec
	Difference: 57856 (22%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon RX 6600 XT should be quite a bit (about 79%) better at anisotropic filtering than the Radeon R9 290X. (explain)

Radeon RX 6600 XT		251904 Mtexels/sec
Radeon R9 290X		140800 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 111104 (79%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon RX 6600 XT should be much (about 146%) more effective at full screen anti-aliasing than the Radeon R9 290X, and also capable of handling higher resolutions more effectively. (explain)

Radeon RX 6600 XT		125952 Mpixels/sec
Radeon R9 290X		51200 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 74752 (146%)

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 MB per second) that can be transported across the external memory interface within a second. It's worked out by multiplying the card's interface width by the speed of its memory. If it uses DDR memory, it should be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The better the bandwidth is, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, HDR and high resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum amount of texture map elements (texels) that are applied in one second. This number is calculated by multiplying the total amount of texture units of the card by the core speed of the chip. The higher this number, the better the graphics 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 could possibly write to the local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is calculated by multiplying the amount of Render Output Units by the clock speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also called Render Output Units) are responsible for drawing the pixels (image) on the screen. The actual pixel fill 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 reach the max fill rate.