GeForce GTX 295 vs Radeon R9 270X

Intro

Compare that to the Radeon R9 270X, which comes with core clock speeds of 1000 MHz on the GPU, and 1400 MHz on the 2048 MB of GDDR5 memory. It features 1280 SPUs as well as 80 Texture Address Units and 32 Rasterization Operator Units.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon R9 270X		180 Watts
GeForce GTX 295		289 Watts
	Difference: 109 Watts (61%)

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically speaking, the GeForce GTX 295 should be much faster than the Radeon R9 270X overall. (explain)

GeForce GTX 295		223776 MB/sec
Radeon R9 270X		179200 MB/sec
	Difference: 44576 (25%)

Texel Rate

The GeForce GTX 295 will be a small bit (approximately 15%) faster with regards to anisotropic filtering than the Radeon R9 270X. (explain)

GeForce GTX 295		92160 Mtexels/sec
Radeon R9 270X		80000 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 12160 (15%)

Pixel Rate

The GeForce GTX 295 is a little bit (approximately 1%) more effective at anti-aliasing than the Radeon R9 270X, and also should be able to handle higher screen resolutions more effectively. (explain)

GeForce GTX 295		32256 Mpixels/sec
Radeon R9 270X		32000 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 256 (1%)

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.

One or more cards in this comparison are multi-core. This means that their bandwidth, texel and pixel rates are theoretically doubled - this does not mean the card will actually perform twice as fast, but only that it should in theory be able to. Actual game benchmarks will give a more accurate idea of what it's capable of.

Price Comparison

Specifications

Memory Bandwidth: Memory bandwidth is the max amount of information (in units of megabytes per second) that can be moved over the external memory interface within a second. It is calculated by multiplying the bus width by the speed of its memory. If the card has DDR type memory, it should be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The better the bandwidth is, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, 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 amount of texture units of the card by the core speed of the chip. The higher the texel rate, the better the video 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 that the graphics card can possibly record to the local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is worked out by multiplying the amount of Render Output Units by the the core speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also sometimes 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 of the card - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the ability to get to the max fill rate.