Geforce GTX 780 vs Radeon R9 M290X

Intro

Compare that to the Radeon R9 M290X, which comes with GPU clock speed of 850 MHz, and 4096 MB of GDDR5 memory running at 1200 MHz through a 256-bit bus. It also features 1280 Stream Processors, 80 TAUs, and 32 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon R9 M290X		100 Watts
Geforce GTX 780		250 Watts
	Difference: 150 Watts (150%)

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically speaking, the Geforce GTX 780 is 88% faster than the Radeon R9 M290X overall, because of its greater data rate. (explain)

Geforce GTX 780		288384 MB/sec
Radeon R9 M290X		153600 MB/sec
	Difference: 134784 (88%)

Texel Rate

The Geforce GTX 780 should be much (more or less 144%) better at anisotropic filtering than the Radeon R9 M290X. (explain)

Geforce GTX 780		165696 Mtexels/sec
Radeon R9 M290X		68000 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 97696 (144%)

Pixel Rate

If using a high screen resolution is important to you, then the Geforce GTX 780 is superior to the Radeon R9 M290X, by a large margin. (explain)

Geforce GTX 780		41424 Mpixels/sec
Radeon R9 M290X		27200 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 14224 (52%)

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 (in units of MB per second) that can be transferred past the external memory interface in a second. It's calculated by multiplying the bus width by its memory clock speed. In the case of DDR type RAM, it must be multiplied by 2 once again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The better the memory bandwidth, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, HDR and high resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum number of texture map elements (texels) that are applied per second. This 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 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 number of pixels that the graphics card could possibly write to its local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is worked out by multiplying the number of Raster Operations Pipelines by the the card's clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - aka Render Output Units) are responsible for filling the screen with pixels (the image). The actual pixel rate is also dependant on quite a few other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the potential to get to the maximum fill rate.