Radeon HD 6990 vs Radeon RX 590

Intro

Compare that to the Radeon RX 590, which makes use of a 12 nm design. AMD has clocked the core frequency at 1469 MHz. The GDDR5 memory is set to run at a speed of 2000 MHz on this particular card. It features 2304 SPUs as well as 144 TAUs and 32 ROPs.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon RX 590		175 Watts
Radeon HD 6990		375 Watts
	Difference: 200 Watts (114%)

Memory Bandwidth

Performance-wise, the Radeon HD 6990 should in theory be a lot superior to the Radeon RX 590 overall. (explain)

Radeon HD 6990		320000 MB/sec
Radeon RX 590		262144 MB/sec
	Difference: 57856 (22%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon RX 590 is much (about 33%) more effective at texture filtering than the Radeon HD 6990. (explain)

Radeon RX 590		211536 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 6990		159360 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 52176 (33%)

Pixel Rate

If running with a high resolution is important to you, then the Radeon HD 6990 is superior to the Radeon RX 590, though only just barely. (explain)

Radeon HD 6990		53120 Mpixels/sec
Radeon RX 590		47008 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 6112 (13%)

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.

One or more cards in this comparison are multi-core. This means that their bandwidth, texel and pixel rates are theoretically doubled - this does not mean the card will actually perform twice as fast, but only that it should in theory be able to. Actual game benchmarks will give a more accurate idea of what it's capable of.

Price Comparison

Specifications

Memory Bandwidth: Bandwidth is the max amount of data (measured in MB per second) that can be transported across the external memory interface in a second. It's worked out by multiplying the card's bus width by its memory speed. If the card has DDR type RAM, the result should 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 anti-aliasing, HDR and higher screen resolutions.

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

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum amount of pixels that the graphics chip can possibly write to the local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is calculated by multiplying the amount of colour ROPs by the clock speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also called Render Output Units) are responsible for filling the screen with pixels (the image). The actual pixel output rate also depends on lots of other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to get to the max fill rate.