GeForce RTX 3080 12 GB vs Radeon R9 290X

Intro

Compare all of that to the Radeon R9 290X, which has GPU clock speed of 800 MHz, and 4096 MB of GDDR5 memory running at 1250 MHz through a 512-bit bus. It also is comprised of 2816 Stream Processors, 176 Texture Address Units, and 64 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon R9 290X		300 Watts
GeForce RTX 3080 12 GB		350 Watts
	Difference: 50 Watts (17%)

Memory Bandwidth

The GeForce RTX 3080 12 GB should theoretically perform quite a bit faster than the Radeon R9 290X overall. (explain)

GeForce RTX 3080 12 GB		934298 MB/sec
Radeon R9 290X		320000 MB/sec
	Difference: 614298 (192%)

Texel Rate

The GeForce RTX 3080 12 GB will be much (more or less 151%) faster with regards to texture filtering than the Radeon R9 290X. (explain)

GeForce RTX 3080 12 GB		352800 Mtexels/sec
Radeon R9 290X		140800 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 212000 (151%)

Pixel Rate

The GeForce RTX 3080 12 GB should be much (approximately 176%) better at AA than the Radeon R9 290X, and able to handle higher screen resolutions without losing too much performance. (explain)

GeForce RTX 3080 12 GB		141120 Mpixels/sec
Radeon R9 290X		51200 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 89920 (176%)

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 data (measured in MB per second) that can be transported past the external memory interface within a second. It's calculated by multiplying the card's bus width by its memory clock speed. If it uses DDR type RAM, it should be multiplied by 2 again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The better the bandwidth is, the better 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 per second. This figure is calculated by multiplying the total amount of texture units by the core 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 processed per second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels the graphics card could possibly record to its local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is worked out by multiplying the amount of Raster Operations Pipelines by the clock speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also sometimes called Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel rate also depends on quite a few other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the potential to reach the max fill rate.