GeForce GTX 295 vs Radeon R9 290

Intro

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

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce GTX 295		289 Watts
Radeon R9 290		300 Watts
	Difference: 11 Watts (4%)

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically speaking, the Radeon R9 290 will be 43% faster than the GeForce GTX 295 overall, because of its greater data rate. (explain)

Radeon R9 290		320000 MB/sec
GeForce GTX 295		223776 MB/sec
	Difference: 96224 (43%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon R9 290 is a lot (approximately 39%) better at anisotropic filtering than the GeForce GTX 295. (explain)

Radeon R9 290		128000 Mtexels/sec
GeForce GTX 295		92160 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 35840 (39%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon R9 290 will be much (more or less 59%) more effective at anti-aliasing than the GeForce GTX 295, and also will be capable of handling higher resolutions without slowing down too much. (explain)

Radeon R9 290		51200 Mpixels/sec
GeForce GTX 295		32256 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 18944 (59%)

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.

One or more cards in this comparison are multi-core. This means that their bandwidth, texel and pixel rates are theoretically doubled - this does not mean the card will actually perform twice as fast, but only that it should in theory be able to. Actual game benchmarks will give a more accurate idea of what it's capable of.

Price Comparison

Specifications

Memory Bandwidth: Memory bandwidth is the largest amount of information (in units of MB per second) that can be transferred across the external memory interface in one second. It's worked out by multiplying the card's interface width by its memory clock speed. In the case of DDR memory, it must be multiplied by 2 again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The better the memory bandwidth, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, HDR and higher screen resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum number of texture map elements (texels) that are processed in one second. This number is calculated by multiplying the total texture units by the core speed of the chip. The higher this number, 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 the local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is calculated by multiplying the number of Render Output Units by the the card's clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also called Render Output Units) are responsible for drawing the pixels (image) on the screen. The actual pixel fill rate is also dependant on quite a few other factors, especially the memory bandwidth - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to get to the maximum fill rate.