Radeon R9 290 vs Radeon RX 470

Intro

Compare those specs to the Radeon RX 470, which uses a 14 nm design. AMD has clocked the core speed at 926 MHz. The GDDR5 RAM works at a speed of 1650 MHz on this particular card. It features 2048 SPUs along with 128 Texture Address Units and 32 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 RX 470		11756 points
Radeon R9 290		9876 points
	Difference: 1880 (19%)

Zcash Mining Hash Rate

Radeon RX 470		289 Sol/s
Radeon R9 290		283 Sol/s
	Difference: 6 (2%)

Ethereum Mining Hash Rate

Radeon R9 290		29 Mh/s
Radeon RX 470		26 Mh/s
	Difference: 3 (12%)

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon RX 470		120 Watts
Radeon R9 290		300 Watts
	Difference: 180 Watts (150%)

Memory Bandwidth

In theory, the Radeon R9 290 is 52% quicker than the Radeon RX 470 overall, due to its greater bandwidth. (explain)

Radeon R9 290		320000 MB/sec
Radeon RX 470		211200 MB/sec
	Difference: 108800 (52%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon R9 290 is a little bit (more or less 8%) better at anisotropic filtering than the Radeon RX 470. (explain)

Radeon R9 290		128000 Mtexels/sec
Radeon RX 470		118528 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 9472 (8%)

Pixel Rate

If using lots of anti-aliasing 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 470		29632 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 21568 (73%)

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 data (counted in megabytes per second) that can be moved over the external memory interface within a second. It's calculated by multiplying the card's interface width by its memory speed. If the card has DDR RAM, it should be multiplied by 2 again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The better the 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 number of texture map elements (texels) that are applied in one second. This is worked out by multiplying the total amount of 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 texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels in one second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most 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 worked out by multiplying the amount of ROPs by the the card's clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - aka Render Output Units) are responsible for filling the screen with pixels (the image). The actual pixel fill rate is also dependant on quite a few other factors, especially the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the ability to get to the max fill rate.