GeForce GTX 970M vs Radeon R9 M290X

Intro

Compare all that to the Radeon R9 M290X, which has clock speeds of 850 MHz on the GPU, and 1200 MHz on the 4096 MB of GDDR5 memory. It features 1280 SPUs as well as 80 TAUs and 32 ROPs.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce GTX 970M		75 Watts
Radeon R9 M290X		100 Watts
	Difference: 25 Watts (33%)

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically, the Radeon R9 M290X should be a lot faster than the GeForce GTX 970M in general. (explain)

Radeon R9 M290X		153600 MB/sec
GeForce GTX 970M		96000 MB/sec
	Difference: 57600 (60%)

Texel Rate

The GeForce GTX 970M should be a small bit (more or less 9%) better at AF than the Radeon R9 M290X. (explain)

GeForce GTX 970M		73920 Mtexels/sec
Radeon R9 M290X		68000 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 5920 (9%)

Pixel Rate

If running with a high resolution is important to you, then the GeForce GTX 970M is a better choice, by a large margin. (explain)

GeForce GTX 970M		44352 Mpixels/sec
Radeon R9 M290X		27200 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 17152 (63%)

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 information (measured in megabytes per second) that can be moved over the external memory interface within a second. The number is worked out by multiplying the bus width by its memory speed. If it uses DDR RAM, the result should be multiplied by 2 again. If DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The better the card's memory bandwidth, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, HDR and high resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum texture map elements (texels) that are processed per second. This figure is worked out by multiplying the total number of texture units 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 per second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum number of pixels that the graphics card could possibly record to its local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is worked out by multiplying the amount of Render Output Units by the the core clock speed. 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 output rate is also dependant on lots of other factors, especially the memory bandwidth - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to reach the max fill rate.