Geforce GTX 690 vs Radeon R9 290X

Intro

Compare those specifications to the Radeon R9 290X, which makes use of a 28 nm design. AMD has clocked the core frequency at 800 MHz. The GDDR5 memory runs at a speed of 1250 MHz on this particular card. It features 2816 SPUs as well as 176 Texture Address Units and 64 Rasterization Operator Units.

Display Graphs

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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 speaking, the Geforce GTX 690 should be 20% quicker than the Radeon R9 290X in general, because of its greater bandwidth. (explain)

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

Texel Rate

The Geforce GTX 690 is much (more or less 66%) better at AF than the Radeon R9 290X. (explain)

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

Pixel Rate

The Geforce GTX 690 will be a small bit (more or less 14%) better at AA than the Radeon R9 290X, and will be able to handle higher screen resolutions without slowing down too much. (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 across the external memory interface in one second. It is calculated by multiplying the card's bus width by its memory clock speed. If the card has DDR memory, it should be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher 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 texture map elements (texels) that can be processed in one second. This number is calculated by multiplying the total number of texture units of the card by the core speed of the chip. The better this number, the better the video card will be at texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels processed in one second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels the video card can possibly record to the local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is calculated by multiplying the number of colour ROPs by the clock speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also sometimes called Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel output rate also depends on quite a few other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the ability to get to the maximum fill rate.