Geforce GTX 690 vs Radeon R9 290X

Intro

Compare those specifications to the Radeon R9 290X, which features a clock speed of 800 MHz and a GDDR5 memory speed of 1250 MHz. It also features a 512-bit bus, and makes use of a 28 nm design. It features 2816 SPUs, 176 Texture Address Units, and 64 ROPs.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Benchmarks

These are real-world performance benchmarks that were submitted by Hardware Compare users. The scores seen here are the average of all benchmarks submitted for each respective test and hardware.

3DMark Fire Strike Graphics Score

Geforce GTX 690		13111 points
Radeon R9 290X		10609 points
	Difference: 2502 (24%)

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Both cards have the same power consumption.

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically, the Geforce GTX 690 should perform a small bit faster than the Radeon R9 290X overall. (explain)

Geforce GTX 690		384512 MB/sec
Radeon R9 290X		320000 MB/sec
	Difference: 64512 (20%)

Texel Rate

The Geforce GTX 690 is quite a bit (about 66%) better at anisotropic filtering than the Radeon R9 290X. (explain)

Geforce GTX 690		234240 Mtexels/sec
Radeon R9 290X		140800 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 93440 (66%)

Pixel Rate

If using a high resolution is important to you, then the Geforce GTX 690 is a better choice, but it probably won't make a huge difference. (explain)

Geforce GTX 690		58560 Mpixels/sec
Radeon R9 290X		51200 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 7360 (14%)

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 maximum amount of information (measured in megabytes per second) that can be moved over the external memory interface in one second. The number is calculated by multiplying the interface width by its memory clock speed. If the card has DDR memory, the result should be multiplied by 2 once again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher 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 number of texture map elements (texels) that are applied per second. This number is calculated by multiplying the total texture units by the core speed of the chip. The better this number, the better the video card will be at handling texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels processed per second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels the video card can possibly record to its local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is worked out by multiplying the amount of ROPs by the the core clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also called Render Output Units) are responsible for filling the screen with pixels (the image). The actual pixel output rate is also dependant on many other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the potential to reach the max fill rate.