Radeon HD 6990 vs Radeon R9 290

Intro

Compare that to the Radeon R9 290, which features core speeds of 800 MHz on the GPU, and 1250 MHz on the 4096 MB of GDDR5 memory. It features 2560 SPUs as well as 160 TAUs and 64 ROPs.

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 290		9876 points
Radeon HD 6990		5820 points
	Difference: 4056 (70%)

Ethereum Mining Hash Rate

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

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

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

Memory Bandwidth

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

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 6990 should be a lot (about 25%) more effective at AF than the Radeon R9 290. (explain)

Radeon HD 6990		159360 Mtexels/sec
Radeon R9 290		128000 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 31360 (25%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon HD 6990 will be a bit (approximately 4%) better at full screen anti-aliasing than the Radeon R9 290, and able to handle higher screen resolutions without losing too much performance. (explain)

Radeon HD 6990		53120 Mpixels/sec
Radeon R9 290		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 (counted in megabytes per second) that can be transferred past the external memory interface within a second. It is calculated by multiplying the card's interface width by its memory speed. If the card has DDR memory, it should be multiplied by 2 once again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The better the bandwidth is, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, High Dynamic Range and higher screen resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum amount of texture map elements (texels) that can be applied per second. This figure is worked out by multiplying the total number of texture units of the card by the core speed of the chip. The better the texel rate, the better the card will be at texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels applied in a second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels that the graphics chip could possibly write to its local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is calculated by multiplying the amount of Render Output Units by the the card's clock speed. 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 lots of other factors, especially the memory bandwidth - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the ability to get to the maximum fill rate.