GeForce GTX 960 vs Radeon R9 290X

Intro

Compare those specifications to the Radeon R9 290X, which features clock speeds of 800 MHz on the GPU, and 1250 MHz on the 4096 MB of GDDR5 RAM. It features 2816 SPUs as well as 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 290X		10609 points
GeForce GTX 960		7627 points
	Difference: 2982 (39%)

Zcash Mining Hash Rate

Radeon R9 290X		369 Sol/s
GeForce GTX 960		154 Sol/s
	Difference: 215 (140%)

Ethereum Mining Hash Rate

Radeon R9 290X		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 290X		300 Watts
	Difference: 180 Watts (150%)

Memory Bandwidth

In theory, the Radeon R9 290X will be 186% quicker than the GeForce GTX 960 overall, because of its higher bandwidth. (explain)

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

Texel Rate

The Radeon R9 290X will be a lot (more or less 95%) better at AF than the GeForce GTX 960. (explain)

Radeon R9 290X		140800 Mtexels/sec
GeForce GTX 960		72128 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 68672 (95%)

Pixel Rate

If running with lots of anti-aliasing is important to you, then the Radeon R9 290X is the winner, by a large margin. (explain)

Radeon R9 290X		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: Bandwidth is the max amount of information (in units of MB per second) that can be transferred past the external memory interface within a second. It is worked out by multiplying the card's interface width by its memory speed. If it uses DDR type RAM, the result should be multiplied by 2 again. If 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 can be processed in one second. This is calculated by multiplying the total amount of texture units of the card by the core speed of the chip. The better this number, the better the 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 maximum number of pixels the video card can possibly write to its local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is calculated by multiplying the number of Render Output Units by the the core clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - aka Render Output Units) are responsible for drawing the pixels (image) on the screen. The actual pixel output rate also depends on many other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the ability to reach the max fill rate.