GeForce GTX 980 Ti vs Radeon R9 290

Intro

Compare 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 memory. 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

GeForce GTX 980 Ti		17120 points
Radeon R9 290		9876 points
	Difference: 7244 (73%)

Zcash Mining Hash Rate

GeForce GTX 980 Ti		425 Sol/s
Radeon R9 290		283 Sol/s
	Difference: 142 (50%)

Ethereum Mining Hash Rate

Radeon R9 290		29 Mh/s
GeForce GTX 980 Ti		22 Mh/s
	Difference: 7 (32%)

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce GTX 980 Ti		250 Watts
Radeon R9 290		300 Watts
	Difference: 50 Watts (20%)

Memory Bandwidth

In theory, the GeForce GTX 980 Ti is 5% quicker than the Radeon R9 290 overall, because of its higher data rate. (explain)

GeForce GTX 980 Ti		336000 MB/sec
Radeon R9 290		320000 MB/sec
	Difference: 16000 (5%)

Texel Rate

The GeForce GTX 980 Ti should be quite a bit (approximately 38%) better at anisotropic filtering than the Radeon R9 290. (explain)

GeForce GTX 980 Ti		176000 Mtexels/sec
Radeon R9 290		128000 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 48000 (38%)

Pixel Rate

If running with a high screen resolution is important to you, then the GeForce GTX 980 Ti is the winner, by far. (explain)

GeForce GTX 980 Ti		96000 Mpixels/sec
Radeon R9 290		51200 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 44800 (88%)

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 (counted in MB per second) that can be transferred past the external memory interface in one second. It's calculated by multiplying the card's interface width by its memory clock speed. If it uses DDR memory, it must be multiplied by 2 once again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The better the memory bandwidth, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, HDR and high resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum number of texture map elements (texels) that are processed per second. This number is worked out by multiplying the total texture units of the card by the core clock speed of the chip. The higher the texel rate, the better the video 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 most pixels the graphics card could possibly record to the local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is worked out by multiplying the amount of colour ROPs by the the card's clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also called Render Output Units) are responsible for filling the screen with pixels (the image). The actual pixel output rate is also dependant on quite a few other factors, especially the memory bandwidth - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the ability to get to the max fill rate.