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Radeon R9 290X vs Radeon RX 590

Intro

The Radeon R9 290X has core clock speeds of 800 MHz on the GPU, and 1250 MHz on the 4096 MB of GDDR5 RAM. It features 2816 SPUs as well as 176 TAUs and 64 ROPs.

Compare those specifications to the Radeon RX 590, which makes use of a 12 nm design. AMD has clocked the core frequency at 1469 MHz. The GDDR5 RAM is set to run at a frequency of 2000 MHz on this model. It features 2304 SPUs along with 144 TAUs and 32 Rasterization Operator Units.

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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

In theory, the Radeon R9 290X is 22% faster than the Radeon RX 590 overall, due to its greater data rate. (explain)

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

Texel Rate

The Radeon RX 590 should be quite a bit (about 50%) more effective 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 using lots of anti-aliasing is important to you, then the Radeon R9 290X is a better choice, not by a very large margin though. (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

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Radeon R9 290X

Amazon.com

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Radeon RX 590

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.

Specifications

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Model Radeon R9 290X Radeon RX 590
Manufacturer AMD AMD
Year October 2013 November 2018
Code Name Hawaii XT Polaris 30
Memory 4096 MB 8192 MB
Core Speed 800 MHz 1469 MHz
Memory Speed 5000 MHz 8000 MHz
Power (Max TDP) 300 watts 175 watts
Bandwidth 320000 MB/sec 262144 MB/sec
Texel Rate 140800 Mtexels/sec 211536 Mtexels/sec
Pixel Rate 51200 Mpixels/sec 47008 Mpixels/sec
Unified Shaders 2816 2304
Texture Mapping Units 176 144
Render Output Units 64 32
Bus Type GDDR5 GDDR5
Bus Width 512-bit 256-bit
Fab Process 28 nm 12 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: Bandwidth is the max amount of data (measured in megabytes per second) that can be transported past the external memory interface within a second. It's worked out by multiplying the bus width by its memory clock speed. If the card has DDR RAM, it should be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The better the memory bandwidth, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, HDR and high resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum amount of texture map elements (texels) that can be applied per second. This is calculated by multiplying the total number 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 per second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum amount of pixels the video card can possibly record to the local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is worked out by multiplying the number of Render Output Units by the the core clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also sometimes called Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel fill rate is also dependant on quite a few other factors, especially 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 290X

Amazon.com

Check prices at:

Radeon RX 590

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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