Radeon R9 290 vs Radeon RX 6600 XT

Intro

Compare all that to the Radeon RX 6600 XT, which has a GPU core clock speed of 1968 MHz, and 8192 MB of GDDR6 RAM set to run at 2000 MHz through a 128-bit bus. It also is made up of 2048 SPUs, 128 Texture Address Units, and 64 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon RX 6600 XT		160 Watts
Radeon R9 290		300 Watts
	Difference: 140 Watts (88%)

Memory Bandwidth

As far as performance goes, the Radeon R9 290 should theoretically be much better than the Radeon RX 6600 XT in general. (explain)

Radeon R9 290		320000 MB/sec
Radeon RX 6600 XT		262144 MB/sec
	Difference: 57856 (22%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon RX 6600 XT should be a lot (approximately 97%) better at texture filtering than the Radeon R9 290. (explain)

Radeon RX 6600 XT		251904 Mtexels/sec
Radeon R9 290		128000 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 123904 (97%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon RX 6600 XT should be a lot (approximately 146%) better at anti-aliasing than the Radeon R9 290, and able to handle higher screen resolutions while still performing well. (explain)

Radeon RX 6600 XT		125952 Mpixels/sec
Radeon R9 290		51200 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 74752 (146%)

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 maximum amount of data (measured in MB per second) that can be moved over the external memory interface in one second. It is calculated by multiplying the bus width by its memory speed. In the case of DDR RAM, it should be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher the bandwidth is, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, High Dynamic Range and high resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum number of texture map elements (texels) that are processed per second. This is worked out by multiplying the total texture units of the card by the core speed of the chip. The higher this number, 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 could 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 the core speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also called Render Output Units) are responsible for drawing the pixels (image) on the screen. The actual pixel output rate also depends on many other factors, especially the memory bandwidth - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the ability to get to the max fill rate.