Radeon HD 7870 XT vs Radeon RX 590

Intro

Compare those specifications to the Radeon RX 590, which features 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 made up of 2304 Stream Processors, 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 HD 7870 XT		185 Watts
	Difference: 10 Watts (6%)

Memory Bandwidth

Performance-wise, the Radeon RX 590 should in theory be a lot better than the Radeon HD 7870 XT in general. (explain)

Radeon RX 590		262144 MB/sec
Radeon HD 7870 XT		192000 MB/sec
	Difference: 70144 (37%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon RX 590 is much (about 138%) more effective at texture filtering than the Radeon HD 7870 XT. (explain)

Radeon RX 590		211536 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 7870 XT		88800 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 122736 (138%)

Pixel Rate

If running with high levels of AA is important to you, then the Radeon RX 590 is superior to the Radeon HD 7870 XT, and very much so. (explain)

Radeon RX 590		47008 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 7870 XT		29600 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 17408 (59%)

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 largest amount of information (counted in MB per second) that can be transferred over the external memory interface in a second. The number is calculated by multiplying the card's bus width by the speed of its memory. If the card has DDR type memory, it must be multiplied by 2 again. If DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The higher the bandwidth is, 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 texture map elements (texels) that are applied per second. This figure is calculated by multiplying the total amount of texture units of the card by the core speed of the chip. The higher the texel rate, the better the card will be at handling texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels in a second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels the graphics card can possibly write to its local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is worked out by multiplying the number of Raster Operations Pipelines by the the core speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also sometimes called Render Output Units) are responsible for drawing the pixels (image) on the screen. The actual pixel fill rate is also dependant 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.