Radeon R9 290 vs Radeon RX 6800 XT

Intro

Compare that to the Radeon RX 6800 XT, which has clock speeds of 1825 MHz on the GPU, and 2000 MHz on the 16384 MB of GDDR6 memory. It features 4608 SPUs along with 288 Texture Address Units and 128 ROPs.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Both cards have the same power consumption.

Memory Bandwidth

In theory, the Radeon RX 6800 XT should perform much faster than the Radeon R9 290 in general. (explain)

Radeon RX 6800 XT		524288 MB/sec
Radeon R9 290		320000 MB/sec
	Difference: 204288 (64%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon RX 6800 XT will be a lot (approximately 311%) better at AF than the Radeon R9 290. (explain)

Radeon RX 6800 XT		525600 Mtexels/sec
Radeon R9 290		128000 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 397600 (311%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon RX 6800 XT should be much (about 356%) more effective at full screen anti-aliasing than the Radeon R9 290, and able to handle higher screen resolutions without slowing down too much. (explain)

Radeon RX 6800 XT		233600 Mpixels/sec
Radeon R9 290		51200 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 182400 (356%)

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 data (measured in MB per second) that can be transferred over the external memory interface in one second. It is worked out by multiplying the card's bus width by its memory clock speed. If it uses DDR type RAM, the result should be multiplied by 2 once again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The better the memory bandwidth, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, High Dynamic Range and higher screen resolutions.

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

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum amount of pixels the video card can possibly write to the local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is calculated by multiplying the number of Raster Operations Pipelines by the clock speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also called Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel output rate is also dependant on many other factors, especially the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the potential to reach the maximum fill rate.