Radeon HD 6790 vs Radeon R9 290X

Intro

Compare all of that to the Radeon R9 290X, which makes use of a 28 nm design. AMD has set the core frequency at 800 MHz. The GDDR5 memory is set to run at a speed of 1250 MHz on this particular card. It features 2816 SPUs along with 176 Texture Address Units and 64 ROPs.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

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 HD 6790		2150 points
	Difference: 8459 (393%)

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon HD 6790		150 Watts
Radeon R9 290X		300 Watts
	Difference: 150 Watts (100%)

Memory Bandwidth

In theory, the Radeon R9 290X should be 138% quicker than the Radeon HD 6790 overall, because of its greater bandwidth. (explain)

Radeon R9 290X		320000 MB/sec
Radeon HD 6790		134400 MB/sec
	Difference: 185600 (138%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon R9 290X should be much (about 319%) more effective at anisotropic filtering than the Radeon HD 6790. (explain)

Radeon R9 290X		140800 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 6790		33600 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 107200 (319%)

Pixel Rate

If using high levels of AA is important to you, then the Radeon R9 290X is a better choice, by far. (explain)

Radeon R9 290X		51200 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 6790		13440 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 37760 (281%)

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 maximum amount of information (in units of MB per second) that can be transported over the external memory interface in a second. It's worked out by multiplying the bus width by its memory clock speed. If the card has DDR RAM, the result should be multiplied by 2 again. If DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The better the bandwidth is, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, High Dynamic Range and high resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum texture map elements (texels) that can be processed in one second. This figure is worked out by multiplying the total texture units of the card by the core speed of the chip. The better 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 in a second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum amount of pixels that the graphics chip could possibly record to the local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is calculated by multiplying the number of Raster Operations Pipelines by the the core clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - aka Render Output Units) are responsible for filling the screen with pixels (the image). The actual pixel rate is also dependant on many other factors, especially the memory bandwidth - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to reach the maximum fill rate.