GeForce GTX 590 vs Radeon R9 M290X

Intro

Compare those specs to the Radeon R9 M290X, which has core speeds of 850 MHz on the GPU, and 1200 MHz on the 4096 MB of GDDR5 memory. It features 1280 SPUs as well as 80 TAUs and 32 Rasterization Operator Units.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon R9 M290X		100 Watts
GeForce GTX 590		365 Watts
	Difference: 265 Watts (265%)

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically speaking, the GeForce GTX 590 is 114% quicker than the Radeon R9 M290X overall, because of its greater bandwidth. (explain)

GeForce GTX 590		328320 MB/sec
Radeon R9 M290X		153600 MB/sec
	Difference: 174720 (114%)

Texel Rate

The GeForce GTX 590 will be a small bit (more or less 14%) faster with regards to anisotropic filtering than the Radeon R9 M290X. (explain)

GeForce GTX 590		77696 Mtexels/sec
Radeon R9 M290X		68000 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 9696 (14%)

Pixel Rate

If running with a high screen resolution is important to you, then the GeForce GTX 590 is the winner, by a large margin. (explain)

GeForce GTX 590		58272 Mpixels/sec
Radeon R9 M290X		27200 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 31072 (114%)

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.

One or more cards in this comparison are multi-core. This means that their bandwidth, texel and pixel rates are theoretically doubled - this does not mean the card will actually perform twice as fast, but only that it should in theory be able to. Actual game benchmarks will give a more accurate idea of what it's capable of.

Price Comparison

Specifications

Memory Bandwidth: Memory bandwidth is the max amount of information (counted in MB per second) that can be transported past the external memory interface in a second. The number is worked out by multiplying the card's bus width by its memory speed. If the card has DDR RAM, the result should be multiplied by 2 once again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The better the card's 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 can be processed per second. This is calculated by multiplying the total number of texture units of the card by the core clock speed of the chip. The higher this number, the better the card will be at handling texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels processed in one second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum amount of pixels that the graphics chip could 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 the card's clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also sometimes 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, most notably the memory bandwidth - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the ability to get to the maximum fill rate.