GeForce GT 320 vs Radeon R9 290

Intro

Compare all of that to the Radeon R9 290, which features clock 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 TAUs and 64 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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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

Performance-wise, the Radeon R9 290 should theoretically be much better than the GeForce GT 320 overall. (explain)

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

Texel Rate

The Radeon R9 290 is a lot (more or less 888%) better 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 is much (approximately 1085%) faster with regards to full screen anti-aliasing than the GeForce GT 320, and also will be able to handle higher screen resolutions better. (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 (counted in MB per second) that can be transferred past the external memory interface in a second. It is calculated by multiplying the interface width by its memory speed. If it uses DDR type memory, it must be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The better the card's memory bandwidth, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, HDR and high resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum texture map elements (texels) that are processed in one second. This is worked out by multiplying the total amount 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 processed in a second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels that the graphics chip could possibly record to the local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is worked out by multiplying the amount of Render Output Units by the the card's clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - sometimes also referred to as Render Output Units) are responsible for filling the screen with pixels (the image). The actual pixel output rate also depends on lots of other factors, especially the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the ability to get to the max fill rate.