GeForce GTX 550 Ti vs Radeon R9 290

Intro

Compare all that to the Radeon R9 290, which comes with clock speeds of 800 MHz on the GPU, and 1250 MHz on the 4096 MB of GDDR5 RAM. It features 2560 SPUs as well as 160 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 290		9876 points
GeForce GTX 550 Ti		1897 points
	Difference: 7979 (421%)

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce GTX 550 Ti		116 Watts
Radeon R9 290		300 Watts
	Difference: 184 Watts (159%)

Memory Bandwidth

The Radeon R9 290 should in theory perform much faster than the GeForce GTX 550 Ti in general. (explain)

Radeon R9 290		320000 MB/sec
GeForce GTX 550 Ti		98496 MB/sec
	Difference: 221504 (225%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon R9 290 will be quite a bit (about 344%) more effective at anisotropic filtering than the GeForce GTX 550 Ti. (explain)

Radeon R9 290		128000 Mtexels/sec
GeForce GTX 550 Ti		28800 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 99200 (344%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon R9 290 will be a lot (about 137%) faster with regards to AA than the GeForce GTX 550 Ti, and also should be able to handle higher screen resolutions better. (explain)

Radeon R9 290		51200 Mpixels/sec
GeForce GTX 550 Ti		21600 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 29600 (137%)

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 (counted in megabytes per second) that can be moved across the external memory interface in a second. It's calculated by multiplying the interface width by its memory clock speed. In the case of DDR memory, it should be multiplied by 2 once again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The better the bandwidth is, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, High Dynamic Range and high resolutions.

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

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum amount of pixels the graphics card can possibly write to the local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is calculated by multiplying the amount of colour ROPs by the clock speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also sometimes called Render Output Units) are responsible for filling the screen with pixels (the image). The actual pixel rate also depends on many other factors, especially the memory bandwidth - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the ability to get to the maximum fill rate.