Radeon R9 290X vs Radeon RX 7900 XT

Intro

Compare those specs to the Radeon RX 7900 XT, which features core speeds of 1500 MHz on the GPU, and 2500 MHz on the 20480 MB of GDDR6 RAM. It features 5376 SPUs along with 336 TAUs and 192 ROPs.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Both cards have the same power consumption.

Memory Bandwidth

Performance-wise, the Radeon RX 7900 XT should in theory be a lot superior to the Radeon R9 290X in general. (explain)

Radeon RX 7900 XT		819200 MB/sec
Radeon R9 290X		320000 MB/sec
	Difference: 499200 (156%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon RX 7900 XT is quite a bit (about 258%) more effective at AF than the Radeon R9 290X. (explain)

Radeon RX 7900 XT		504000 Mtexels/sec
Radeon R9 290X		140800 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 363200 (258%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon RX 7900 XT is much (approximately 463%) more effective at FSAA than the Radeon R9 290X, and capable of handling higher resolutions while still performing well. (explain)

Radeon RX 7900 XT		288000 Mpixels/sec
Radeon R9 290X		51200 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 236800 (463%)

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 largest amount of data (in units of MB per second) that can be transferred over the external memory interface in a second. The number is worked out by multiplying the interface width by its memory clock speed. If the card has DDR memory, it must be multiplied by 2 once again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The higher the card's memory bandwidth, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, HDR and high resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum texture map elements (texels) that can be applied in one second. This is calculated by multiplying the total amount of texture units of the card by the core clock 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 per second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum number of pixels that the graphics card could possibly write to the local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is calculated by multiplying the number of colour ROPs by the the core clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - aka Render Output Units) are responsible for filling the screen with pixels (the image). The actual pixel rate is also dependant on lots of other factors, especially the memory bandwidth - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to reach the max fill rate.