Radeon R9 280X vs Radeon R9 290X

Intro

Compare those specifications to the Radeon R9 290X, which comes with core clock speeds of 800 MHz on the GPU, and 1250 MHz on the 4096 MB of GDDR5 memory. It features 2816 SPUs as well as 176 TAUs and 64 Rasterization Operator Units.

Display Graphs

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Benchmarks

These are real-world performance benchmarks that were submitted by Hardware Compare users. The scores seen here are the average of all benchmarks submitted for each respective test and hardware.

3DMark Fire Strike Graphics Score

Radeon R9 290X		10609 points
Radeon R9 280X		8886 points
	Difference: 1723 (19%)

Zcash Mining Hash Rate

Radeon R9 290X		369 Sol/s
Radeon R9 280X		294 Sol/s
	Difference: 75 (26%)

Ethereum Mining Hash Rate

Radeon R9 290X		29 Mh/s
Radeon R9 280X		21 Mh/s
	Difference: 8 (38%)

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon R9 280X		250 Watts
Radeon R9 290X		300 Watts
	Difference: 50 Watts (20%)

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically speaking, the Radeon R9 290X is 11% quicker than the Radeon R9 280X overall, due to its higher data rate. (explain)

Radeon R9 290X		320000 MB/sec
Radeon R9 280X		288000 MB/sec
	Difference: 32000 (11%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon R9 290X should be a lot (about 29%) better at anisotropic filtering than the Radeon R9 280X. (explain)

Radeon R9 290X		140800 Mtexels/sec
Radeon R9 280X		108800 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 32000 (29%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon R9 290X is a lot (about 88%) more effective at anti-aliasing than the Radeon R9 280X, and able to handle higher resolutions without losing too much performance. (explain)

Radeon R9 290X		51200 Mpixels/sec
Radeon R9 280X		27200 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 24000 (88%)

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 (in units of megabytes per second) that can be moved over the external memory interface in a second. The number is calculated by multiplying the bus width by its memory clock speed. In the case of DDR type memory, the result should be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The better the bandwidth is, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, HDR and high resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum texture map elements (texels) that are processed in one second. This number is worked out by multiplying the total amount of texture units of the card by the core clock speed of the chip. The higher the texel rate, the better the video 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 maximum amount of pixels the graphics card could possibly write to its local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is calculated by multiplying the amount of Raster Operations Pipelines by the the card's clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also called Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel rate is also dependant on quite a few other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the ability to get to the maximum fill rate.