Radeon R9 290 vs Radeon RX 590

Intro

Compare those specs to the Radeon RX 590, which comes with a clock frequency of 1469 MHz and a GDDR5 memory frequency of 2000 MHz. It also uses a 256-bit memory bus, and uses a 12 nm design. It is comprised of 2304 SPUs, 144 Texture Address Units, and 32 Raster Operation Units.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon RX 590		175 Watts
Radeon R9 290		300 Watts
	Difference: 125 Watts (71%)

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically speaking, the Radeon R9 290 should be a lot faster than the Radeon RX 590 in general. (explain)

Radeon R9 290		320000 MB/sec
Radeon RX 590		262144 MB/sec
	Difference: 57856 (22%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon RX 590 will be quite a bit (about 65%) better at anisotropic filtering than the Radeon R9 290. (explain)

Radeon RX 590		211536 Mtexels/sec
Radeon R9 290		128000 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 83536 (65%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon R9 290 is a small bit (more or less 9%) better at anti-aliasing than the Radeon RX 590, and should be able to handle higher screen resolutions without slowing down too much. (explain)

Radeon R9 290		51200 Mpixels/sec
Radeon RX 590		47008 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 4192 (9%)

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 across the external memory interface in one second. It is worked out by multiplying the card's interface width by its memory clock speed. If it uses DDR RAM, it must be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. 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 by the core speed of the chip. The higher the texel rate, the better the video 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 most pixels that the graphics card can possibly record to the local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is calculated by multiplying the amount of ROPs by the clock speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also called Render Output Units) are responsible for drawing the pixels (image) on the screen. The actual pixel rate also depends on quite a few other factors, especially the memory bandwidth - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the ability to reach the max fill rate.