GeForce GTX 460 SE vs Radeon R9 290

Intro

Compare all of that to the Radeon R9 290, which uses a 28 nm design. AMD has clocked the core frequency at 800 MHz. The GDDR5 memory is set to run at a speed of 1250 MHz on this particular model. It features 2560 SPUs along with 160 Texture Address Units and 64 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce GTX 460 SE		150 Watts
Radeon R9 290		300 Watts
	Difference: 150 Watts (100%)

Memory Bandwidth

Performance-wise, the Radeon R9 290 should theoretically be quite a bit better than the GeForce GTX 460 SE in general. (explain)

Radeon R9 290		320000 MB/sec
GeForce GTX 460 SE		108800 MB/sec
	Difference: 211200 (194%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon R9 290 should be quite a bit (approximately 310%) better at anisotropic filtering than the GeForce GTX 460 SE. (explain)

Radeon R9 290		128000 Mtexels/sec
GeForce GTX 460 SE		31200 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 96800 (310%)

Pixel Rate

If running with high levels of AA is important to you, then the Radeon R9 290 is a better choice, by a large margin. (explain)

Radeon R9 290		51200 Mpixels/sec
GeForce GTX 460 SE		20800 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 30400 (146%)

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 information (counted in megabytes per second) that can be transferred over the external memory interface within a second. It is calculated by multiplying the interface width by its memory speed. If it uses DDR type memory, it should be multiplied by 2 once again. If it uses 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 higher screen resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum 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 speed of the chip. The higher the texel rate, the better the graphics card will be at texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels in a second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum amount of pixels that the graphics card could possibly write to the local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is calculated by multiplying the number of Render Output Units 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 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 maximum fill rate.