GeForce GTX 460 1GB vs Radeon R9 290

Intro

Compare those specs to the Radeon R9 290, which features a clock speed of 800 MHz and a GDDR5 memory frequency of 1250 MHz. It also uses a 512-bit memory bus, and uses a 28 nm design. It is made up of 2560 SPUs, 160 TAUs, and 64 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce GTX 460 1GB		160 Watts
Radeon R9 290		300 Watts
	Difference: 140 Watts (88%)

Memory Bandwidth

Performance-wise, the Radeon R9 290 should theoretically be a lot superior to the GeForce GTX 460 1GB in general. (explain)

Radeon R9 290		320000 MB/sec
GeForce GTX 460 1GB		115200 MB/sec
	Difference: 204800 (178%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon R9 290 should be quite a bit (approximately 239%) faster with regards to AF than the GeForce GTX 460 1GB. (explain)

Radeon R9 290		128000 Mtexels/sec
GeForce GTX 460 1GB		37800 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 90200 (239%)

Pixel Rate

If running with a high screen resolution is important to you, then the Radeon R9 290 is superior to the GeForce GTX 460 1GB, by far. (explain)

Radeon R9 290		51200 Mpixels/sec
GeForce GTX 460 1GB		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: Memory bandwidth is the largest amount of information (counted in MB per second) that can be transferred across the external memory interface in a second. The number is calculated by multiplying the bus width by its memory speed. If it uses DDR memory, the result should be multiplied by 2 once again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher the memory bandwidth, 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 can be applied per second. This is worked out by multiplying the total texture units of the card by the core clock speed of the chip. The higher the texel rate, the better the video card will be at handling texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels applied in one second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum amount of pixels that the graphics card can possibly record to the local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is calculated by multiplying the number of ROPs by the the core speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - sometimes also referred to as Render Output Units) are responsible for drawing the pixels (image) on the screen. The actual pixel output rate also depends on many other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the ability to get to the maximum fill rate.