GeForce GTX 980M vs Radeon R9 M290X

Intro

Compare all of that to the Radeon R9 M290X, which has a core clock frequency of 850 MHz and a GDDR5 memory speed of 1200 MHz. It also features a 256-bit bus, and makes use of a 28 nm design. It is comprised of 1280 SPUs, 80 Texture Address Units, and 32 Raster Operation Units.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Both cards have the same power consumption.

Memory Bandwidth

In theory, the Radeon R9 M290X should perform a bit faster than the GeForce GTX 980M in general. (explain)

Radeon R9 M290X		153600 MB/sec
GeForce GTX 980M		128000 MB/sec
	Difference: 25600 (20%)

Texel Rate

The GeForce GTX 980M will be a lot (more or less 47%) faster with regards to anisotropic filtering than the Radeon R9 M290X. (explain)

GeForce GTX 980M		99648 Mtexels/sec
Radeon R9 M290X		68000 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 31648 (47%)

Pixel Rate

If running with a high resolution is important to you, then the GeForce GTX 980M is the winner, by a large margin. (explain)

GeForce GTX 980M		66432 Mpixels/sec
Radeon R9 M290X		27200 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 39232 (144%)

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 largest amount of data (measured in megabytes per second) that can be transferred over the external memory interface in one second. It is calculated by multiplying the bus width by its memory clock speed. If the card has DDR memory, the result should be multiplied by 2 once again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The better the bandwidth is, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, HDR and higher screen resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum number of texture map elements (texels) that are processed per second. This number is calculated by multiplying the total number of texture units by the core clock speed of the chip. The higher the texel rate, the better the graphics 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 amount of pixels the graphics card can possibly record to the local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is calculated by multiplying the number of Raster Operations Pipelines by the the card's clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also sometimes called Render Output Units) are responsible for filling the screen with pixels (the image). The actual pixel fill rate is also dependant 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.