GeForce GT 450 (OEM) vs Radeon R9 290

Intro

Compare those specifications to the Radeon R9 290, which makes use of a 28 nm design. AMD has set the core frequency at 800 MHz. The GDDR5 RAM works at a speed of 1250 MHz on this card. 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 GT 450 (OEM)		106 Watts
Radeon R9 290		300 Watts
	Difference: 194 Watts (183%)

Memory Bandwidth

The Radeon R9 290, in theory, should be a lot faster than the GeForce GT 450 (OEM) in general. (explain)

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

Texel Rate

The Radeon R9 290 should be quite a bit (approximately 575%) more effective at texture 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

The Radeon R9 290 will be quite a bit (about 170%) better at AA than the GeForce GT 450 (OEM), and also able to handle higher screen resolutions without slowing down too much. (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: Memory bandwidth is the max amount of data (in units of MB per second) that can be transferred across the external memory interface in a second. The number is worked out by multiplying the bus width by its memory speed. If the card has DDR memory, it should be multiplied by 2 once again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The better the card's 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 are processed per second. This number is worked out by multiplying the total number of texture units of the card by the core clock speed of the chip. The better the texel rate, the better the graphics card will be at handling texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels applied in a second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels the video card could possibly record to its local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is calculated by multiplying the amount of Render Output Units 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 output rate also depends on many other factors, especially the memory bandwidth - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the potential to reach the maximum fill rate.