Radeon R9 280X vs Radeon RX 590

Intro

Compare that to the Radeon RX 590, which has a GPU core clock speed of 1469 MHz, and 8192 MB of GDDR5 RAM 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.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon RX 590		175 Watts
Radeon R9 280X		250 Watts
	Difference: 75 Watts (43%)

Memory Bandwidth

The Radeon R9 280X, in theory, should perform a little bit faster than the Radeon RX 590 in general. (explain)

Radeon R9 280X		288000 MB/sec
Radeon RX 590		262144 MB/sec
	Difference: 25856 (10%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon RX 590 will be a lot (more or less 94%) better at anisotropic filtering than the Radeon R9 280X. (explain)

Radeon RX 590		211536 Mtexels/sec
Radeon R9 280X		108800 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 102736 (94%)

Pixel Rate

If running with high levels of AA is important to you, then the Radeon RX 590 is superior to the Radeon R9 280X, by a large margin. (explain)

Radeon RX 590		47008 Mpixels/sec
Radeon R9 280X		27200 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 19808 (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: Bandwidth is the max amount of data (counted in MB per second) that can be transported across the external memory interface in a second. The number is calculated by multiplying the interface width by its memory clock speed. In the case of DDR memory, it should be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The higher the memory bandwidth, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, High Dynamic Range and high resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum number of texture map elements (texels) that can be processed per second. This number is calculated by multiplying the total amount of texture units of the card by the core clock speed of the chip. The better this number, the better the graphics card will be at handling texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels applied in a second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum number of pixels the graphics card 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 Render Output Units by the clock speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - aka Render Output Units) are responsible for filling the screen with pixels (the image). The actual pixel output rate also depends on quite a few other factors, especially the memory bandwidth - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the potential to reach the max fill rate.