GeForce GTX 960 vs Radeon R9 290

Intro

Compare all of that to the Radeon R9 290, which makes use of a 28 nm design. AMD has set the core speed at 800 MHz. The GDDR5 RAM runs at a frequency of 1250 MHz on this specific card. It features 2560 SPUs along with 160 TAUs and 64 ROPs.

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

Radeon R9 290		9876 points
GeForce GTX 960		7627 points
	Difference: 2249 (29%)

Zcash Mining Hash Rate

Radeon R9 290		283 Sol/s
GeForce GTX 960		154 Sol/s
	Difference: 129 (84%)

Ethereum Mining Hash Rate

Radeon R9 290		29 Mh/s
GeForce GTX 960		11 Mh/s
	Difference: 18 (164%)

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce GTX 960		120 Watts
Radeon R9 290		300 Watts
	Difference: 180 Watts (150%)

Memory Bandwidth

In theory, the Radeon R9 290 should perform much faster than the GeForce GTX 960 in general. (explain)

Radeon R9 290		320000 MB/sec
GeForce GTX 960		112000 MB/sec
	Difference: 208000 (186%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon R9 290 is a lot (approximately 77%) faster with regards to texture filtering than the GeForce GTX 960. (explain)

Radeon R9 290		128000 Mtexels/sec
GeForce GTX 960		72128 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 55872 (77%)

Pixel Rate

If running with lots of anti-aliasing is important to you, then the Radeon R9 290 is superior to the GeForce GTX 960, and very much so. (explain)

Radeon R9 290		51200 Mpixels/sec
GeForce GTX 960		36064 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 15136 (42%)

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 largest amount of data (measured in megabytes per second) that can be transported past the external memory interface in a second. It is worked out by multiplying the bus width by its memory speed. If the card has DDR type RAM, the result should be multiplied by 2 once again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher the bandwidth is, 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 number of texture map elements (texels) that are processed per second. This is worked out by multiplying the total texture units of the card 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 applied per second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum amount of pixels the graphics card can possibly record to its local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is worked out by multiplying the amount of Raster Operations Pipelines by the the core speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also called Render Output Units) are responsible for drawing the pixels (image) on the screen. The actual pixel rate also depends on many other factors, especially the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the ability to get to the maximum fill rate.