Geforce GTX 680 vs Radeon R9 290X

Intro

Compare that to the Radeon R9 290X, which makes use of a 28 nm design. AMD has clocked the core speed at 800 MHz. The GDDR5 RAM is set to run at a frequency of 1250 MHz on this particular model. It features 2816 SPUs as well as 176 TAUs 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

Radeon R9 290X		10609 points
Geforce GTX 680		7650 points
	Difference: 2959 (39%)

Grand Theft Auto V | 1920x1080 | Very High

Radeon R9 290X		60 FPS
Geforce GTX 680		38 FPS
	Difference: 22 (58%)

Ethereum Mining Hash Rate

Radeon R9 290X		29 Mh/s
Geforce GTX 680		16 Mh/s
	Difference: 13 (81%)

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Geforce GTX 680		195 Watts
Radeon R9 290X		300 Watts
	Difference: 105 Watts (54%)

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically speaking, the Radeon R9 290X is 66% faster than the Geforce GTX 680 overall, because of its greater bandwidth. (explain)

Radeon R9 290X		320000 MB/sec
Geforce GTX 680		192256 MB/sec
	Difference: 127744 (66%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon R9 290X should be a small bit (more or less 9%) more effective at anisotropic filtering than the Geforce GTX 680. (explain)

Radeon R9 290X		140800 Mtexels/sec
Geforce GTX 680		128768 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 12032 (9%)

Pixel Rate

If using a high screen resolution is important to you, then the Radeon R9 290X is superior to the Geforce GTX 680, by far. (explain)

Radeon R9 290X		51200 Mpixels/sec
Geforce GTX 680		32192 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 19008 (59%)

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 (measured in MB per second) that can be moved past the external memory interface in a second. The number is calculated by multiplying the card's bus width by its memory speed. In the case of DDR type RAM, the result should be multiplied by 2 once again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher the bandwidth is, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, HDR and high resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum texture map elements (texels) that are processed in one second. This is worked out by multiplying the total texture units of the card by the core clock speed of the chip. The higher this number, the better the graphics 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 that the graphics chip could possibly record to its local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is calculated by multiplying the amount of Render Output Units by the the card's clock speed. 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 is also dependant on many other factors, especially the memory bandwidth - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the ability to get to the max fill rate.