Radeon R9 290X vs Radeon RX 590

Intro

Compare all that to the Radeon RX 590, which features 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 features 2304 SPUs, 144 TAUs, and 32 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

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

Memory Bandwidth

Performance-wise, the Radeon R9 290X should theoretically be much better than the Radeon RX 590 in general. (explain)

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

Texel Rate

The Radeon RX 590 will be quite a bit (more or less 50%) better at anisotropic filtering than the Radeon R9 290X. (explain)

Radeon RX 590		211536 Mtexels/sec
Radeon R9 290X		140800 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 70736 (50%)

Pixel Rate

If running with a high resolution is important to you, then the Radeon R9 290X is a better choice, but it probably won't make a huge difference. (explain)

Radeon R9 290X		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: Bandwidth is the max amount of information (counted in megabytes per second) that can be moved across the external memory interface in one second. It is worked out by multiplying the interface width by its memory speed. If the card has DDR memory, the result should be multiplied by 2 again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher the bandwidth is, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, HDR and high resolutions.

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

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels the video card can possibly write to the local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is worked out by multiplying the number of Raster Operations Pipelines by the clock speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - sometimes also referred to as Render Output Units) are responsible for filling the screen with pixels (the image). The actual pixel fill rate also depends on many other factors, especially the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to reach the maximum fill rate.