Geforce GTX 690 vs Radeon R9 290

Intro

Compare all that to the Radeon R9 290, which has clock speeds of 800 MHz on the GPU, and 1250 MHz on the 4096 MB of GDDR5 memory. It features 2560 SPUs along with 160 Texture Address Units and 64 ROPs.

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 290		9876 points
	Difference: 3235 (33%)

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Both cards have the same power consumption.

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically, the Geforce GTX 690 should perform a bit faster than the Radeon R9 290 in general. (explain)

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

Texel Rate

The Geforce GTX 690 should be a lot (more or less 83%) faster with regards to texture filtering than the Radeon R9 290. (explain)

Geforce GTX 690		234240 Mtexels/sec
Radeon R9 290		128000 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 106240 (83%)

Pixel Rate

The Geforce GTX 690 should be a bit (approximately 14%) more effective at anti-aliasing than the Radeon R9 290, and also should be able to handle higher resolutions more effectively. (explain)

Geforce GTX 690		58560 Mpixels/sec
Radeon R9 290		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: Bandwidth is the largest amount of information (counted in MB per second) that can be transported past the external memory interface in a second. It is worked out by multiplying the interface width by its memory speed. In the case of DDR type memory, the result should be multiplied by 2 once again. If DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The higher the memory bandwidth, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, HDR and high resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum number of texture map elements (texels) that are applied per second. This is calculated by multiplying the total number of texture units of the card by the core speed of the chip. The better the texel rate, the better the 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 that the graphics chip can possibly write to the local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is calculated by multiplying the number of colour ROPs by the the card's clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also called Render Output Units) are responsible for drawing the pixels (image) on the screen. The actual pixel output rate is also dependant on quite a few other factors, especially the memory bandwidth - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the ability to reach the maximum fill rate.