Geforce GTX 680 vs Radeon R9 M290X

Intro

Compare all of that to the Radeon R9 M290X, which uses a 28 nm design. AMD has clocked the core speed at 850 MHz. The GDDR5 RAM works at a frequency of 1200 MHz on this particular model. It features 1280 SPUs as well as 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 680		195 Watts
	Difference: 95 Watts (95%)

Memory Bandwidth

As far as performance goes, the Geforce GTX 680 should in theory be much better than the Radeon R9 M290X in general. (explain)

Geforce GTX 680		192256 MB/sec
Radeon R9 M290X		153600 MB/sec
	Difference: 38656 (25%)

Texel Rate

The Geforce GTX 680 is much (about 89%) better at anisotropic filtering than the Radeon R9 M290X. (explain)

Geforce GTX 680		128768 Mtexels/sec
Radeon R9 M290X		68000 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 60768 (89%)

Pixel Rate

If running with a high screen resolution is important to you, then the Geforce GTX 680 is the winner, but it probably won't make a huge difference. (explain)

Geforce GTX 680		32192 Mpixels/sec
Radeon R9 M290X		27200 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 4992 (18%)

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: Memory bandwidth is the largest amount of data (counted in MB per second) that can be transferred across the external memory interface in one second. It's calculated by multiplying the card's bus width by the speed of its memory. If the card has DDR type memory, it should be multiplied by 2 once again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The higher the card's 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 amount of texture map elements (texels) that are applied in one second. This figure is calculated by multiplying the total number of texture units of the card by the core speed of the chip. The better this number, the better the video card will be at texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels applied in a second.

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