GeForce GTX 960M vs Radeon R9 M290X

Intro

Compare all of that to the Radeon R9 M290X, which features a clock speed of 850 MHz and a GDDR5 memory frequency of 1200 MHz. It also features a 256-bit bus, and uses a 28 nm design. It is made up of 1280 SPUs, 80 Texture Address Units, and 32 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce GTX 960M		65 Watts
Radeon R9 M290X		100 Watts
	Difference: 35 Watts (54%)

Memory Bandwidth

In theory, the Radeon R9 M290X is 140% quicker than the GeForce GTX 960M overall, due to its greater bandwidth. (explain)

Radeon R9 M290X		153600 MB/sec
GeForce GTX 960M		64000 MB/sec
	Difference: 89600 (140%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon R9 M290X is much (about 55%) more effective at anisotropic filtering than the GeForce GTX 960M. (explain)

Radeon R9 M290X		68000 Mtexels/sec
GeForce GTX 960M		43840 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 24160 (55%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon R9 M290X will be a lot (about 55%) faster with regards to FSAA than the GeForce GTX 960M, and capable of handling higher screen resolutions better. (explain)

Radeon R9 M290X		27200 Mpixels/sec
GeForce GTX 960M		17536 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 9664 (55%)

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 largest amount of information (counted in MB per second) that can be transported past the external memory interface in a second. The number is worked out by multiplying the bus width by the speed of its memory. If it uses DDR type memory, it should be multiplied by 2 again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The better the memory bandwidth, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, High Dynamic Range and higher screen resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum texture map elements (texels) that are applied in one second. This figure is worked out by multiplying the total number of texture units of the card by the core speed of the chip. The higher the texel rate, the better the video card will be at handling texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels processed in a second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum number of pixels that the graphics card could possibly write to its local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is calculated by multiplying the number of colour ROPs by the the core clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - aka Render Output Units) are responsible for drawing the pixels (image) on the screen. The actual pixel rate is also dependant on quite a few other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to reach the maximum fill rate.