GeForce GTX 960 vs Radeon R9 295X2

Intro

Compare all of that to the Radeon R9 295X2, which makes use of a 28 nm design. AMD has set the core frequency at 1018 MHz. The GDDR5 memory runs at a frequency of 1250 MHz on this card. It features 2816 SPUs along with 176 Texture Address Units and 64 Rasterization Operator Units.

Display Graphs

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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

Radeon R9 295X2		21205 points
GeForce GTX 960		7627 points
	Difference: 13578 (178%)

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce GTX 960		120 Watts
Radeon R9 295X2		500 Watts
	Difference: 380 Watts (317%)

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically speaking, the Radeon R9 295X2 should be 471% faster than the GeForce GTX 960 in general, because of its higher bandwidth. (explain)

Radeon R9 295X2		640000 MB/sec
GeForce GTX 960		112000 MB/sec
	Difference: 528000 (471%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon R9 295X2 will be a lot (about 397%) better at texture filtering than the GeForce GTX 960. (explain)

Radeon R9 295X2		358336 Mtexels/sec
GeForce GTX 960		72128 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 286208 (397%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon R9 295X2 will be a lot (more or less 261%) more effective at full screen anti-aliasing than the GeForce GTX 960, and should be capable of handling higher resolutions without losing too much performance. (explain)

Radeon R9 295X2		130304 Mpixels/sec
GeForce GTX 960		36064 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 94240 (261%)

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 megabytes per second) that can be moved past the external memory interface in a second. The number is calculated by multiplying the bus width by the speed of its memory. 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 card's memory bandwidth, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, HDR and higher screen resolutions.

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

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum number of pixels that the graphics chip can possibly write to the 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 the card's clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also called Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel rate also depends on quite a few other factors, especially the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the ability to reach the maximum fill rate.