GeForce GTX 950 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 memory. It features 2816 SPUs along with 176 Texture Address Units 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 290X		10609 points
GeForce GTX 950		6536 points
	Difference: 4073 (62%)

Ethereum Mining Hash Rate

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

Zcash Mining Hash Rate

Radeon R9 290X		369 Sol/s
GeForce GTX 950		155 Sol/s
	Difference: 214 (138%)

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

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

Memory Bandwidth

The Radeon R9 290X should theoretically be a lot faster than the GeForce GTX 950 in general. (explain)

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

Texel Rate

The Radeon R9 290X should be quite a bit (approximately 186%) better at texture filtering than the GeForce GTX 950. (explain)

Radeon R9 290X		140800 Mtexels/sec
GeForce GTX 950		49152 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 91648 (186%)

Pixel Rate

If running with a high screen resolution is important to you, then the Radeon R9 290X is a better choice, by a large margin. (explain)

Radeon R9 290X		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 max amount of information (counted in MB per second) that can be transferred past the external memory interface in a second. The number is calculated by multiplying the card's bus width by its memory speed. If the card has DDR memory, it must be multiplied by 2 once again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The better the bandwidth is, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, High Dynamic Range and high resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum number of texture map elements (texels) that can be applied in one second. This figure is worked out by multiplying the total number of texture units by the core clock 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 in a second.

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