Radeon R9 M290X vs Radeon RX 6500 XT

Intro

Compare all that to the Radeon RX 6500 XT, which comes with core clock speeds of 2200 MHz on the GPU, and 2250 MHz on the 4096 MB of GDDR6 memory. It features 1024 SPUs along with 64 TAUs and 32 ROPs.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon R9 M290X		100 Watts
Radeon RX 6500 XT		107 Watts
	Difference: 7 Watts (7%)

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically, the Radeon R9 M290X should perform just a bit faster than the Radeon RX 6500 XT in general. (explain)

Radeon R9 M290X		153600 MB/sec
Radeon RX 6500 XT		147456 MB/sec
	Difference: 6144 (4%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon RX 6500 XT is quite a bit (more or less 107%) more effective at anisotropic filtering than the Radeon R9 M290X. (explain)

Radeon RX 6500 XT		140800 Mtexels/sec
Radeon R9 M290X		68000 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 72800 (107%)

Pixel Rate

If using a high resolution is important to you, then the Radeon RX 6500 XT is superior to the Radeon R9 M290X, by a large margin. (explain)

Radeon RX 6500 XT		70400 Mpixels/sec
Radeon R9 M290X		27200 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 43200 (159%)

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 information (counted in MB per second) that can be transported past the external memory interface within a second. It's calculated by multiplying the bus width by its memory clock speed. If the card has DDR RAM, it must be multiplied by 2 again. If DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The better the card's 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 amount of texture map elements (texels) that can be processed in one second. This is calculated by multiplying the total texture units of the card by the core speed of the chip. The higher this number, the better the graphics card will be at texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels applied in one second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels the graphics card can possibly record 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 clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - sometimes also referred to as Render Output Units) are responsible for drawing the pixels (image) on the screen. The actual pixel rate also depends on quite a few other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the ability to get to the maximum fill rate.