GeForce 930M vs Radeon R9 M290X

Intro

Compare all that to the Radeon R9 M290X, which features GPU clock speed of 850 MHz, and 4096 MB of GDDR5 RAM running at 1200 MHz through a 256-bit bus. It also is made up of 1280 SPUs, 80 Texture Address Units, and 32 Raster Operation Units.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Memory Bandwidth

Performance-wise, the Radeon R9 M290X should in theory be quite a bit superior to the GeForce 930M overall. (explain)

Radeon R9 M290X		153600 MB/sec
GeForce 930M		14400 MB/sec
	Difference: 139200 (967%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon R9 M290X will be much (about 205%) better at AF than the GeForce 930M. (explain)

Radeon R9 M290X		68000 Mtexels/sec
GeForce 930M		22272 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 45728 (205%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon R9 M290X should be quite a bit (more or less 266%) more effective at full screen anti-aliasing than the GeForce 930M, and able to handle higher screen resolutions without slowing down too much. (explain)

Radeon R9 M290X		27200 Mpixels/sec
GeForce 930M		7424 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 19776 (266%)

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 (measured in megabytes per second) that can be moved past the external memory interface within a second. It's calculated by multiplying the interface width by its memory clock speed. In the case of DDR type memory, it should be multiplied by 2 once again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The better the memory bandwidth, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, High Dynamic Range and higher screen resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum amount of texture map elements (texels) that are processed per second. This number is calculated 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 per second.

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