GeForce GTS 450 1GB vs Radeon R9 290

Intro

Compare those specifications to the Radeon R9 290, which has core clock speeds of 800 MHz on the GPU, and 1250 MHz on the 4096 MB of GDDR5 RAM. It features 2560 SPUs along with 160 Texture Address Units and 64 Rasterization Operator Units.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce GTS 450 1GB		106 Watts
Radeon R9 290		300 Watts
	Difference: 194 Watts (183%)

Memory Bandwidth

As far as performance goes, the Radeon R9 290 should theoretically be a lot superior to the GeForce GTS 450 1GB overall. (explain)

Radeon R9 290		320000 MB/sec
GeForce GTS 450 1GB		57728 MB/sec
	Difference: 262272 (454%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon R9 290 is a lot (approximately 411%) more effective at AF than the GeForce GTS 450 1GB. (explain)

Radeon R9 290		128000 Mtexels/sec
GeForce GTS 450 1GB		25056 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 102944 (411%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon R9 290 should be a lot (about 309%) better at anti-aliasing than the GeForce GTS 450 1GB, and also should be able to handle higher screen resolutions more effectively. (explain)

Radeon R9 290		51200 Mpixels/sec
GeForce GTS 450 1GB		12528 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 38672 (309%)

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 (measured in megabytes per second) that can be moved across the external memory interface within a second. It is calculated by multiplying the interface width by the speed of its memory. In the case of DDR type memory, the result should be multiplied by 2 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, HDR and high resolutions.

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

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels the video card could possibly write to the local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is calculated by multiplying the amount 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 filling the screen with pixels (the image). The actual pixel rate also depends on quite a few other factors, especially the memory bandwidth - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the ability to get to the maximum fill rate.