GeForce GTX Titan Black vs Radeon R9 290

Intro

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

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Benchmarks

These are real-world performance benchmarks that were submitted by Hardware Compare users. The scores seen here are the average of all benchmarks submitted for each respective test and hardware.

3DMark Fire Strike Graphics Score

GeForce GTX Titan Black		11666 points
Radeon R9 290		9876 points
	Difference: 1790 (18%)

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce GTX Titan Black		250 Watts
Radeon R9 290		300 Watts
	Difference: 50 Watts (20%)

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically speaking, the GeForce GTX Titan Black is 5% faster than the Radeon R9 290 in general, because of its higher bandwidth. (explain)

GeForce GTX Titan Black		336000 MB/sec
Radeon R9 290		320000 MB/sec
	Difference: 16000 (5%)

Texel Rate

The GeForce GTX Titan Black should be a lot (approximately 67%) more effective at texture filtering than the Radeon R9 290. (explain)

GeForce GTX Titan Black		213360 Mtexels/sec
Radeon R9 290		128000 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 85360 (67%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon R9 290 should be a little bit (about 20%) more effective at anti-aliasing than the GeForce GTX Titan Black, and also should be able to handle higher screen resolutions without slowing down too much. (explain)

Radeon R9 290		51200 Mpixels/sec
GeForce GTX Titan Black		42672 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 8528 (20%)

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 (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 interface width by its memory clock speed. If it uses DDR type RAM, it should be multiplied by 2 once again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The better the card's 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 texture map elements (texels) that can be processed per second. This number is calculated by multiplying the total number of texture units by the core speed of the chip. The higher the texel rate, the better the video card will be at texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels per second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels that the graphics card could possibly write to its local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is calculated by multiplying the number of Raster Operations Pipelines by the the core clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also sometimes called Render Output Units) are responsible for drawing the pixels (image) on the screen. The actual pixel rate is also dependant on many other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the ability to get to the maximum fill rate.