GeForce GTX 560 vs Radeon R9 290

Intro

Compare all of that to the Radeon R9 290, which comes with a core clock speed of 800 MHz and a GDDR5 memory speed of 1250 MHz. It also makes use of a 512-bit memory bus, and makes use of a 28 nm design. It is comprised of 2560 SPUs, 160 Texture Address Units, and 64 Raster Operation Units.

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 290		9876 points
GeForce GTX 560		3030 points
	Difference: 6846 (226%)

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce GTX 560		150 Watts
Radeon R9 290		300 Watts
	Difference: 150 Watts (100%)

Memory Bandwidth

In theory, the Radeon R9 290 should be quite a bit faster than the GeForce GTX 560 in general. (explain)

Radeon R9 290		320000 MB/sec
GeForce GTX 560		128128 MB/sec
	Difference: 191872 (150%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon R9 290 will be a lot (more or less 182%) better at anisotropic filtering than the GeForce GTX 560. (explain)

Radeon R9 290		128000 Mtexels/sec
GeForce GTX 560		45360 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 82640 (182%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon R9 290 will be a lot (approximately 98%) more effective at FSAA than the GeForce GTX 560, and will be capable of handling higher resolutions more effectively. (explain)

Radeon R9 290		51200 Mpixels/sec
GeForce GTX 560		25920 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 25280 (98%)

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 maximum amount of information (in units of MB per second) that can be transported across the external memory interface within a second. It's calculated by multiplying the card's interface width by its memory clock speed. In the case of DDR RAM, the result should be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The higher the card's memory bandwidth, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, HDR and higher screen resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum number of texture map elements (texels) that can be applied per second. This figure is worked out by multiplying the total amount of texture units of the card by the core clock speed of the chip. The better this number, the better the graphics card will be at handling texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels in one second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum number of pixels that the graphics chip could possibly record to its local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is calculated by multiplying the number of Render Output Units by the the core speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - aka Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel rate is also dependant on many other factors, especially the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the potential to reach the max fill rate.