Geforce GTX 780 vs Radeon R9 290X

Intro

The Geforce GTX 780 uses a 28 nm design. nVidia has clocked the core speed at 863 MHz. The GDDR5 memory is set to run at a speed of 1502 MHz on this specific card. It features 2304 SPUs along with 192 TAUs and 48 ROPs.

Compare those specs to the Radeon R9 290X, which uses a 28 nm design. AMD has set the core frequency at 800 MHz. The GDDR5 memory is set to run at a speed of 1250 MHz on this specific card. It features 2816 SPUs along with 176 TAUs and 64 ROPs.

Price Comparison

Specifications

Memory Bandwidth: Memory bandwidth is the largest amount of information (measured in MB per second) that can be moved over the external memory interface in a second. It's calculated by multiplying the card's interface width by the speed of its memory. In the case of DDR RAM, it should be multiplied by 2 again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The better the memory bandwidth, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, High Dynamic Range and higher screen resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum amount of texture map elements (texels) that are processed per second. This figure is calculated by multiplying the total amount of texture units by the core speed of the chip. The higher the texel rate, 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 maximum amount of pixels the graphics card can possibly record to its local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is calculated by multiplying the number of ROPs by the the core speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - sometimes also referred to as Render Output Units) are responsible for filling the screen with pixels (the image). The actual pixel fill rate is also dependant on lots of other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the ability to reach the max fill rate.