Geforce GTX 670 vs Radeon R9 M290X

Intro

Compare those specifications to the Radeon R9 M290X, which has 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 ROPs.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon R9 M290X		100 Watts
Geforce GTX 670		170 Watts
	Difference: 70 Watts (70%)

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically speaking, the Geforce GTX 670 is 25% faster than the Radeon R9 M290X in general, because of its greater data rate. (explain)

Geforce GTX 670		192000 MB/sec
Radeon R9 M290X		153600 MB/sec
	Difference: 38400 (25%)

Texel Rate

The Geforce GTX 670 is much (more or less 51%) more effective at AF than the Radeon R9 M290X. (explain)

Geforce GTX 670		102480 Mtexels/sec
Radeon R9 M290X		68000 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 34480 (51%)

Pixel Rate

If using high levels of AA is important to you, then the Geforce GTX 670 is superior to the Radeon R9 M290X, but not by far. (explain)

Geforce GTX 670		29280 Mpixels/sec
Radeon R9 M290X		27200 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 2080 (8%)

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 MB per second) that can be moved across the external memory interface within a second. It's calculated by multiplying the interface width by its memory clock speed. If it uses DDR type RAM, it must be multiplied by 2 again. If DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The better the memory bandwidth, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, HDR and higher screen resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum texture map elements (texels) that can be applied in one second. This is calculated by multiplying the total texture units by the core clock 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 per second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum amount of pixels that the graphics chip can possibly write to the local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is calculated by multiplying the amount of ROPs by the the core clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - sometimes also referred to as Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel fill rate is also dependant on many other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the ability to get to the maximum fill rate.