GeForce GT 450 (OEM) vs Radeon R9 290

Intro

Compare that to the Radeon R9 290, which comes with core speeds of 800 MHz on the GPU, and 1250 MHz on the 4096 MB of GDDR5 memory. It features 2560 SPUs as well as 160 Texture Address Units and 64 ROPs.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce GT 450 (OEM)		106 Watts
Radeon R9 290		300 Watts
	Difference: 194 Watts (183%)

Memory Bandwidth

In theory, the Radeon R9 290 should be 233% faster than the GeForce GT 450 (OEM) in general, because of its higher bandwidth. (explain)

Radeon R9 290		320000 MB/sec
GeForce GT 450 (OEM)		96000 MB/sec
	Difference: 224000 (233%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon R9 290 will be a lot (approximately 575%) faster with regards to anisotropic filtering than the GeForce GT 450 (OEM). (explain)

Radeon R9 290		128000 Mtexels/sec
GeForce GT 450 (OEM)		18960 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 109040 (575%)

Pixel Rate

If running with a high resolution 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 GT 450 (OEM)		18960 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 32240 (170%)

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 data (in units of MB per second) that can be transported past the external memory interface in one second. It is calculated by multiplying the interface width by its memory clock speed. In the case of DDR RAM, the result should be multiplied by 2 once again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher the card's memory bandwidth, the better 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 are processed in one second. This figure is calculated by multiplying the total texture units of the card by the core speed of the chip. The better this number, the better the video card will be at texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels in one second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels the video card could possibly record to the local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is worked out 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 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 maximum fill rate.