Radeon R9 270X vs Radeon RX 590

Intro

Compare all that to the Radeon RX 590, which has a clock speed of 1469 MHz and a GDDR5 memory speed of 2000 MHz. It also uses a 256-bit memory bus, and makes use of a 12 nm design. It is made up of 2304 SPUs, 144 Texture Address Units, 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 270X		180 Watts
	Difference: 5 Watts (3%)

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically speaking, the Radeon RX 590 will be 46% faster than the Radeon R9 270X in general, because of its higher data rate. (explain)

Radeon RX 590		262144 MB/sec
Radeon R9 270X		179200 MB/sec
	Difference: 82944 (46%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon RX 590 should be a lot (more or less 164%) more effective at anisotropic filtering than the Radeon R9 270X. (explain)

Radeon RX 590		211536 Mtexels/sec
Radeon R9 270X		80000 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 131536 (164%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon RX 590 should be a lot (more or less 47%) better at full screen anti-aliasing than the Radeon R9 270X, and able to handle higher screen resolutions without losing too much performance. (explain)

Radeon RX 590		47008 Mpixels/sec
Radeon R9 270X		32000 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 15008 (47%)

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 (in units of MB per second) that can be moved over the external memory interface in one second. The number is worked out by multiplying the card's interface width by its memory clock speed. If the card has DDR type RAM, it should be multiplied by 2 once again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher the card's memory bandwidth, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, HDR and higher screen resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum number of texture map elements (texels) that can be applied in one second. This is worked out by multiplying the total texture units of the card 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 per second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels that the graphics card can possibly write to its local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is worked out by multiplying the amount 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 outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel rate is also dependant on many 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.