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Radeon R9 290 vs Radeon RX 480

Intro

The Radeon R9 290 makes use of a 28 nm design. AMD has clocked the core speed at 800 MHz. The GDDR5 RAM works at a frequency of 1250 MHz on this particular card. It features 2560 SPUs as well as 160 Texture Address Units and 64 Rasterization Operator Units.

Compare all of that to the Radeon RX 480, which comes with a GPU core clock speed of 1120 MHz, and 8192 MB of GDDR5 memory running at 2000 MHz through a 256-bit bus. It also is comprised of 2304 Stream Processors, 144 Texture Address Units, and 32 Raster Operation Units.

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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 RX 480 13349 points
Radeon R9 290 9876 points
Difference: 3473 (35%)

Zcash Mining Hash Rate

Radeon R9 290 283 Sol/s
Radeon RX 480 280 Sol/s
Difference: 3 (1%)

Ethereum Mining Hash Rate

Radeon R9 290 29 Mh/s
Radeon RX 480 27 Mh/s
Difference: 2 (7%)

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon RX 480 150 Watts
Radeon R9 290 300 Watts
Difference: 150 Watts (100%)

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically speaking, the Radeon R9 290 should be 22% faster than the Radeon RX 480 in general, because of its higher bandwidth. (explain)

Radeon R9 290 320000 MB/sec
Radeon RX 480 262144 MB/sec
Difference: 57856 (22%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon RX 480 will be quite a bit (approximately 26%) faster with regards to anisotropic filtering than the Radeon R9 290. (explain)

Radeon RX 480 161280 Mtexels/sec
Radeon R9 290 128000 Mtexels/sec
Difference: 33280 (26%)

Pixel Rate

If running with high levels of AA is important to you, then the Radeon R9 290 is a better choice, by a large margin. (explain)

Radeon R9 290 51200 Mpixels/sec
Radeon RX 480 35840 Mpixels/sec
Difference: 15360 (43%)

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

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Radeon R9 290

Amazon.com

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Radeon RX 480

Amazon.com

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Please note that the price comparisons are based on search keywords - sometimes it might show cards with very similar names that are not exactly the same as the one chosen in the comparison. We do try to filter out the wrong results as best we can, though.

Specifications

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Model Radeon R9 290 Radeon RX 480
Manufacturer AMD AMD
Year November 2013 June 2016
Code Name Hawaii PRO Polaris 10
Memory 4096 MB 8192 MB
Core Speed 800 MHz 1120 MHz
Memory Speed 5000 MHz 8000 MHz
Power (Max TDP) 300 watts 150 watts
Bandwidth 320000 MB/sec 262144 MB/sec
Texel Rate 128000 Mtexels/sec 161280 Mtexels/sec
Pixel Rate 51200 Mpixels/sec 35840 Mpixels/sec
Unified Shaders 2560 2304
Texture Mapping Units 160 144
Render Output Units 64 32
Bus Type GDDR5 GDDR5
Bus Width 512-bit 256-bit
Fab Process 28 nm 14 nm
Transistors 6200 million 5700 million
Bus PCIe 3.0 x16 PCIe 3.0 x16
DirectX Version DirectX 11.2 DirectX 12.0
OpenGL Version OpenGL 4.3 OpenGL 4.5

Memory Bandwidth: Memory bandwidth is the max amount of data (in units of 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 the speed of its memory. If the card has DDR RAM, it must be multiplied by 2 once again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The better the card's memory bandwidth, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, High Dynamic Range and higher screen resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum number of texture map elements (texels) that are applied in one second. This number is calculated by multiplying the total texture units of the card by the core speed of the chip. The higher the texel rate, the better the 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 the video card can possibly record to the local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is calculated by multiplying the amount of Render Output Units by the the core speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also sometimes called Render Output Units) are responsible for filling the screen with pixels (the image). The actual pixel fill rate also depends on many other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the potential to get to the max fill rate.

Display Prices

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Radeon R9 290

Amazon.com

Check prices at:

Radeon RX 480

Amazon.com

Check prices at:

Please note that the price comparisons are based on search keywords - sometimes it might show cards with very similar names that are not exactly the same as the one chosen in the comparison. We do try to filter out the wrong results as best we can, though.

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