GeForce GT 440 3GB vs Radeon R9 290

Intro

Compare those specifications to the Radeon R9 290, which uses a 28 nm design. AMD has clocked the core speed at 800 MHz. The GDDR5 RAM is set to run at a frequency of 1250 MHz on this card. It features 2560 SPUs as well as 160 TAUs and 64 Rasterization Operator Units.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce GT 440 3GB		56 Watts
Radeon R9 290		300 Watts
	Difference: 244 Watts (436%)

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically, the Radeon R9 290 should be a lot faster than the GeForce GT 440 3GB overall. (explain)

Radeon R9 290		320000 MB/sec
GeForce GT 440 3GB		43200 MB/sec
	Difference: 276800 (641%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon R9 290 should be quite a bit (approximately 798%) faster with regards to anisotropic filtering than the GeForce GT 440 3GB. (explain)

Radeon R9 290		128000 Mtexels/sec
GeForce GT 440 3GB		14256 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 113744 (798%)

Pixel Rate

If running with high levels of AA is important to you, then the Radeon R9 290 is the winner, and very much so. (explain)

Radeon R9 290		51200 Mpixels/sec
GeForce GT 440 3GB		14256 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 36944 (259%)

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 max amount of information (measured in MB per second) that can be moved across the external memory interface in a second. It's calculated by multiplying the card's interface width by the speed of its memory. If it uses DDR RAM, it must be multiplied by 2 once again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The better 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 are processed per second. This number is calculated by multiplying the total number of texture units by the core clock speed of the chip. The better this number, the better the card will be at handling texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels in one second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum amount of pixels the graphics card could possibly record to the local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is calculated by multiplying the number of Render Output Units by the clock 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 is also dependant on lots of other factors, especially the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the potential to reach the maximum fill rate.