Radeon HD 6990 vs Radeon R9 290X

Intro

Compare those specifications to the Radeon R9 290X, which has a core clock speed of 800 MHz and a GDDR5 memory frequency of 1250 MHz. It also makes use of a 512-bit bus, and uses a 28 nm design. It is comprised of 2816 SPUs, 176 Texture Address Units, and 64 Raster Operation 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 HD 6990		5820 points
	Difference: 4789 (82%)

Ethereum Mining Hash Rate

Radeon R9 290X		29 Mh/s
Radeon HD 6990		24 Mh/s
	Difference: 5 (21%)

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon R9 290X		300 Watts
Radeon HD 6990		375 Watts
	Difference: 75 Watts (25%)

Memory Bandwidth

Both cards have exactly the same bandwidth, so theoretically they should have the same performance. (explain)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 6990 is just a bit (approximately 13%) faster with regards to anisotropic filtering than the Radeon R9 290X. (explain)

Radeon HD 6990		159360 Mtexels/sec
Radeon R9 290X		140800 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 18560 (13%)

Pixel Rate

If using a high screen resolution is important to you, then the Radeon HD 6990 is a better choice, but not by far. (explain)

Radeon HD 6990		53120 Mpixels/sec
Radeon R9 290X		51200 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 1920 (4%)

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.

One or more cards in this comparison are multi-core. This means that their bandwidth, texel and pixel rates are theoretically doubled - this does not mean the card will actually perform twice as fast, but only that it should in theory be able to. Actual game benchmarks will give a more accurate idea of what it's capable of.

Price Comparison

Specifications

Memory Bandwidth: Memory bandwidth is the maximum amount of data (measured in megabytes per second) that can be moved over the external memory interface in one second. It is calculated by multiplying the card's interface width by the speed of its memory. If the card has DDR memory, it should be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The higher the card's memory bandwidth, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, HDR and high resolutions.

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