GeForce GT 340 vs Radeon R9 290

Intro

Compare those specs to the Radeon R9 290, which comes with a clock frequency of 800 MHz and a GDDR5 memory frequency of 1250 MHz. It also uses a 512-bit bus, and uses a 28 nm design. It features 2560 SPUs, 160 Texture Address Units, and 64 Raster Operation Units.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce GT 340		69 Watts
Radeon R9 290		300 Watts
	Difference: 231 Watts (335%)

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically speaking, the Radeon R9 290 will be 488% faster than the GeForce GT 340 in general, because of its greater data rate. (explain)

Radeon R9 290		320000 MB/sec
GeForce GT 340		54400 MB/sec
	Difference: 265600 (488%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon R9 290 is quite a bit (about 627%) better at anisotropic filtering than the GeForce GT 340. (explain)

Radeon R9 290		128000 Mtexels/sec
GeForce GT 340		17600 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 110400 (627%)

Pixel Rate

If using high levels of AA is important to you, then the Radeon R9 290 is the winner, by a large margin. (explain)

Radeon R9 290		51200 Mpixels/sec
GeForce GT 340		4400 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 46800 (1064%)

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 (counted in megabytes per second) that can be moved across the external memory interface in one second. It's calculated by multiplying the card's bus width by its memory clock speed. In the case of DDR type memory, it must be multiplied by 2 again. If DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The better the bandwidth is, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, High Dynamic Range and high resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum amount of texture map elements (texels) that are applied in one second. This is worked out by multiplying the total number of texture units by the core clock speed of the chip. The better the texel rate, the better the 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 maximum amount of pixels the video card can possibly record to its local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is worked out by multiplying the number of Render Output Units by the the core speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also called 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, most notably the memory bandwidth - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to reach the maximum fill rate.