GeForce GTX 660 Ti vs Radeon R9 M290X

Intro

Compare that to the Radeon R9 M290X, which features core speeds of 850 MHz on the GPU, and 1200 MHz on the 4096 MB of GDDR5 RAM. It features 1280 SPUs along with 80 Texture Address Units and 32 Rasterization Operator Units.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon R9 M290X		100 Watts
GeForce GTX 660 Ti		150 Watts
	Difference: 50 Watts (50%)

Memory Bandwidth

In theory, the Radeon R9 M290X should be 7% quicker than the GeForce GTX 660 Ti in general, due to its higher bandwidth. (explain)

Radeon R9 M290X		153600 MB/sec
GeForce GTX 660 Ti		144000 MB/sec
	Difference: 9600 (7%)

Texel Rate

The GeForce GTX 660 Ti should be quite a bit (about 51%) more effective at anisotropic filtering than the Radeon R9 M290X. (explain)

GeForce GTX 660 Ti		102480 Mtexels/sec
Radeon R9 M290X		68000 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 34480 (51%)

Pixel Rate

If using a high resolution is important to you, then the Radeon R9 M290X is superior to the GeForce GTX 660 Ti, by a large margin. (explain)

Radeon R9 M290X		27200 Mpixels/sec
GeForce GTX 660 Ti		21960 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 5240 (24%)

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 data (in units of megabytes per second) that can be transferred past the external memory interface in one second. The number is worked out by multiplying the bus width by the speed of its memory. If it uses DDR type memory, it must be multiplied by 2 again. If DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The higher the card's memory bandwidth, the faster 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 in one second. This figure is calculated by multiplying the total texture units by the core clock speed of the chip. The better 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 one second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum number of pixels the video card could possibly write to the local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is worked out by multiplying the amount of ROPs by the clock speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - aka Render Output Units) are responsible for filling the screen with pixels (the image). The actual pixel output rate also depends on quite a few other factors, especially the memory bandwidth - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to reach the max fill rate.