GeForce RTX 4090 vs Radeon RX 590

Intro

Compare those specifications to the Radeon RX 590, which has core clock speeds of 1469 MHz on the GPU, and 2000 MHz on the 8192 MB of GDDR5 RAM. It features 2304 SPUs as well as 144 Texture Address Units and 32 Rasterization Operator Units.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon RX 590		175 Watts
GeForce RTX 4090		450 Watts
	Difference: 275 Watts (157%)

Memory Bandwidth

In theory, the GeForce RTX 4090 should be 298% quicker than the Radeon RX 590 in general, because of its greater bandwidth. (explain)

GeForce RTX 4090		1042432 MB/sec
Radeon RX 590		262144 MB/sec
	Difference: 780288 (298%)

Texel Rate

The GeForce RTX 4090 will be much (more or less 441%) faster with regards to texture filtering than the Radeon RX 590. (explain)

GeForce RTX 4090		1144320 Mtexels/sec
Radeon RX 590		211536 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 932784 (441%)

Pixel Rate

If using a high screen resolution is important to you, then the GeForce RTX 4090 is the winner, by a large margin. (explain)

GeForce RTX 4090		393360 Mpixels/sec
Radeon RX 590		47008 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 346352 (737%)

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 max amount of information (measured in megabytes per second) that can be transferred past the external memory interface in one second. It's calculated by multiplying the bus width by its memory speed. If the card has DDR type memory, it should be multiplied by 2 once again. If DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The better the card's memory bandwidth, the faster 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 amount of texture map elements (texels) that can be processed in one second. This number is calculated by multiplying the total number of texture units by the core clock 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 in one second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum amount of pixels that the graphics card can possibly record to the local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is worked out by multiplying the number of ROPs by the the core 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 fill rate also depends on many other factors, especially the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to get to the max fill rate.