Radeon R9 290 vs Radeon RX 6600

Intro

Compare those specifications to the Radeon RX 6600, which has a GPU core clock speed of 1626 MHz, and 8192 MB of GDDR6 RAM set to run at 1750 MHz through a 128-bit bus. It also is made up of 1792 Stream Processors, 112 TAUs, and 64 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon RX 6600		132 Watts
Radeon R9 290		300 Watts
	Difference: 168 Watts (127%)

Memory Bandwidth

The Radeon R9 290 should in theory be a lot faster than the Radeon RX 6600 in general. (explain)

Radeon R9 290		320000 MB/sec
Radeon RX 6600		229376 MB/sec
	Difference: 90624 (40%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon RX 6600 is a lot (approximately 42%) more effective at texture filtering than the Radeon R9 290. (explain)

Radeon RX 6600		182112 Mtexels/sec
Radeon R9 290		128000 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 54112 (42%)

Pixel Rate

If running with high levels of AA is important to you, then the Radeon RX 6600 is a better choice, by a large margin. (explain)

Radeon RX 6600		104064 Mpixels/sec
Radeon R9 290		51200 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 52864 (103%)

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 max amount of data (in units of MB per second) that can be moved past the external memory interface within a second. It's calculated by multiplying the bus width by the speed of its memory. If the card has DDR memory, it must be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The better the memory bandwidth, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, HDR and higher screen resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum amount of texture map elements (texels) that can be processed per second. This number is calculated by multiplying the total texture units 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 processed in one second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels the video card can possibly write to its 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 the core clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also sometimes called Render Output Units) are responsible for filling the screen with pixels (the image). The actual pixel output rate also depends on quite a few other factors, especially the memory bandwidth - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to get to the maximum fill rate.