GeForce GT 320 vs Radeon R9 290

Intro

Compare all that to the Radeon R9 290, which comes with GPU core speed of 800 MHz, and 4096 MB of GDDR5 memory set to run at 1250 MHz through a 512-bit bus. It also is made up of 2560 SPUs, 160 Texture Address Units, and 64 ROPs.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce GT 320		43 Watts
Radeon R9 290		300 Watts
	Difference: 257 Watts (598%)

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically speaking, the Radeon R9 290 will be 1166% quicker than the GeForce GT 320 overall, because of its higher bandwidth. (explain)

Radeon R9 290		320000 MB/sec
GeForce GT 320		25280 MB/sec
	Difference: 294720 (1166%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon R9 290 will be a lot (about 888%) more effective at texture filtering than the GeForce GT 320. (explain)

Radeon R9 290		128000 Mtexels/sec
GeForce GT 320		12960 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 115040 (888%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon R9 290 should be quite a bit (approximately 1085%) more effective at anti-aliasing than the GeForce GT 320, and should be able to handle higher screen resolutions while still performing well. (explain)

Radeon R9 290		51200 Mpixels/sec
GeForce GT 320		4320 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 46880 (1085%)

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 maximum amount of information (in units of megabytes per second) that can be transported over the external memory interface in one second. It's worked out by multiplying the card's interface width by its memory speed. In the case of DDR memory, the result should be multiplied by 2 once again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The better the memory bandwidth, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, High Dynamic Range and high resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum texture map elements (texels) that are processed per second. This figure is calculated by multiplying the total number of texture units of the card by the core speed of the chip. The higher the texel rate, the better the card will be at handling texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels in a second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum amount of pixels the video card can possibly record to its local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is worked out by multiplying the number of Raster Operations Pipelines 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 fill rate is also dependant on lots of other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the ability to get to the max fill rate.