GeForce GT 130 vs Radeon R9 290

Intro

Compare all of that to the Radeon R9 290, which comes with core clock speeds of 800 MHz on the GPU, and 1250 MHz on the 4096 MB of GDDR5 RAM. It features 2560 SPUs along with 160 TAUs and 64 ROPs.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce GT 130		75 Watts
Radeon R9 290		300 Watts
	Difference: 225 Watts (300%)

Memory Bandwidth

Performance-wise, the Radeon R9 290 should theoretically be a lot better than the GeForce GT 130 overall. (explain)

Radeon R9 290		320000 MB/sec
GeForce GT 130		12000 MB/sec
	Difference: 308000 (2567%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon R9 290 should be much (approximately 967%) faster with regards to AF than the GeForce GT 130. (explain)

Radeon R9 290		128000 Mtexels/sec
GeForce GT 130		12000 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 116000 (967%)

Pixel Rate

If running with a high screen resolution is important to you, then the Radeon R9 290 is a better choice, by far. (explain)

Radeon R9 290		51200 Mpixels/sec
GeForce GT 130		8000 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 43200 (540%)

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: Memory bandwidth is the maximum amount of data (in units of megabytes per second) that can be transported over the external memory interface in a second. It is calculated by multiplying the interface width by its memory clock speed. In the case of DDR memory, the result should be multiplied by 2 once again. If DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The better the bandwidth is, 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 number of texture map elements (texels) that can be applied per second. This number is calculated by multiplying the total amount of texture units of the card by the core clock 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 could possibly write to its local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is worked out by multiplying the number of colour ROPs by the clock speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - aka Render Output Units) are responsible for filling the screen with pixels (the image). The actual pixel output rate also depends on many other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to get to the maximum fill rate.