Radeon R9 290X vs Radeon R9 380X

Intro

Compare those specifications to the Radeon R9 380X, which makes use of a 28 nm design. AMD has set the core speed at 970 MHz. The GDDR5 memory works at a speed of 1425 MHz on this specific card. It features 2048 SPUs along with 128 Texture Address Units and 32 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 R9 380X		9519 points
	Difference: 1090 (11%)

Ethereum Mining Hash Rate

Radeon R9 290X		29 Mh/s
Radeon R9 380X		19 Mh/s
	Difference: 10 (53%)

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon R9 380X		190 Watts
Radeon R9 290X		300 Watts
	Difference: 110 Watts (58%)

Memory Bandwidth

Performance-wise, the Radeon R9 290X should theoretically be a lot better than the Radeon R9 380X in general. (explain)

Radeon R9 290X		320000 MB/sec
Radeon R9 380X		182400 MB/sec
	Difference: 137600 (75%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon R9 290X should be a bit (approximately 13%) better at texture filtering than the Radeon R9 380X. (explain)

Radeon R9 290X		140800 Mtexels/sec
Radeon R9 380X		124160 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 16640 (13%)

Pixel Rate

If using lots of anti-aliasing is important to you, then the Radeon R9 290X is a better choice, by far. (explain)

Radeon R9 290X		51200 Mpixels/sec
Radeon R9 380X		31040 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 20160 (65%)

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 largest amount of data (measured in megabytes per second) that can be transported across the external memory interface in a second. The number is calculated by multiplying the card's interface width by its memory speed. If the card has DDR memory, it must be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher the card's memory bandwidth, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, High Dynamic Range and high resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum amount of texture map elements (texels) that are processed per second. This is calculated by multiplying the total number of texture units by the core clock speed of the chip. The better this number, the better the graphics card will be at texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels applied per second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum amount of pixels that the graphics chip can possibly write to the local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is calculated by multiplying the amount of Render Output Units by the clock speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also called Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel output rate is also dependant on quite a few other factors, especially the memory bandwidth - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the ability to reach the max fill rate.