GeForce GTX 950 vs Radeon R9 290

Intro

Compare all that to the Radeon R9 290, which uses a 28 nm design. AMD has set the core speed at 800 MHz. The GDDR5 RAM works at a speed of 1250 MHz on this particular card. It features 2560 SPUs along with 160 TAUs and 64 Rasterization Operator Units.

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 950		6536 points
	Difference: 3340 (51%)

Ethereum Mining Hash Rate

Radeon R9 290		29 Mh/s
GeForce GTX 950		10 Mh/s
	Difference: 19 (190%)

Zcash Mining Hash Rate

Radeon R9 290		283 Sol/s
GeForce GTX 950		155 Sol/s
	Difference: 128 (83%)

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce GTX 950		90 Watts
Radeon R9 290		300 Watts
	Difference: 210 Watts (233%)

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically speaking, the Radeon R9 290 should be quite a bit faster than the GeForce GTX 950 in general. (explain)

Radeon R9 290		320000 MB/sec
GeForce GTX 950		105728 MB/sec
	Difference: 214272 (203%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon R9 290 will be a lot (more or less 160%) more effective at texture filtering than the GeForce GTX 950. (explain)

Radeon R9 290		128000 Mtexels/sec
GeForce GTX 950		49152 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 78848 (160%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon R9 290 will be much (approximately 56%) faster with regards to full screen anti-aliasing than the GeForce GTX 950, and also should be able to handle higher resolutions more effectively. (explain)

Radeon R9 290		51200 Mpixels/sec
GeForce GTX 950		32768 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 18432 (56%)

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 maximum amount of data (in units of MB per second) that can be moved past the external memory interface in one second. It is calculated by multiplying the interface width by its memory clock speed. If it uses DDR type memory, the result should be multiplied by 2 again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher the card's memory bandwidth, the faster 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 processed per second. This number is calculated by multiplying the total texture units of the card by the core clock speed of the chip. The higher this number, the better the card will be at texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels processed in one second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels the video card can 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 colour ROPs by the the core clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - aka Render Output Units) are responsible for filling the screen with pixels (the image). The actual pixel fill rate also depends on many other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the potential to reach the maximum fill rate.