GeForce GTX 980 Ti vs Radeon R9 290X

Intro

Compare all of that to the Radeon R9 290X, which has core clock speeds of 800 MHz on the GPU, and 1250 MHz on the 4096 MB of GDDR5 memory. It features 2816 SPUs along with 176 Texture Address Units and 64 ROPs.

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

GeForce GTX 980 Ti		17120 points
Radeon R9 290X		10609 points
	Difference: 6511 (61%)

Grand Theft Auto V | 1920x1080 | Very High

GeForce GTX 980 Ti		80 FPS
Radeon R9 290X		60 FPS
	Difference: 20 (33%)

Zcash Mining Hash Rate

GeForce GTX 980 Ti		425 Sol/s
Radeon R9 290X		369 Sol/s
	Difference: 56 (15%)

Ethereum Mining Hash Rate

Radeon R9 290X		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 290X		300 Watts
	Difference: 50 Watts (20%)

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically speaking, the GeForce GTX 980 Ti will be 5% faster than the Radeon R9 290X in general, because of its greater data rate. (explain)

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

Texel Rate

The GeForce GTX 980 Ti will be a lot (approximately 25%) more effective at AF than the Radeon R9 290X. (explain)

GeForce GTX 980 Ti		176000 Mtexels/sec
Radeon R9 290X		140800 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 35200 (25%)

Pixel Rate

If running with a high resolution is important to you, then the GeForce GTX 980 Ti is a better choice, and very much so. (explain)

GeForce GTX 980 Ti		96000 Mpixels/sec
Radeon R9 290X		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 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 its memory speed. In the case of DDR RAM, it must 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 amount of texture map elements (texels) that can be processed in one second. This number 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 graphics card will be at texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels in a second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels that the graphics card could possibly record to its local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is worked out by multiplying the amount of Render Output Units by the clock speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - sometimes also referred to as Render Output Units) are responsible for filling the screen with pixels (the image). The actual pixel fill rate also depends on quite a few other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the ability to reach the max fill rate.