GeForce GTX 580 vs Radeon R9 M290X

Intro

Compare those specifications to the Radeon R9 M290X, which has clock 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 580		244 Watts
	Difference: 144 Watts (144%)

Memory Bandwidth

The GeForce GTX 580, in theory, should be much faster than the Radeon R9 M290X overall. (explain)

GeForce GTX 580		192384 MB/sec
Radeon R9 M290X		153600 MB/sec
	Difference: 38784 (25%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon R9 M290X should be a lot (about 38%) more effective at anisotropic filtering than the GeForce GTX 580. (explain)

Radeon R9 M290X		68000 Mtexels/sec
GeForce GTX 580		49408 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 18592 (38%)

Pixel Rate

The GeForce GTX 580 should be quite a bit (about 36%) faster with regards to anti-aliasing than the Radeon R9 M290X, and also able to handle higher resolutions better. (explain)

GeForce GTX 580		37056 Mpixels/sec
Radeon R9 M290X		27200 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 9856 (36%)

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 maximum amount of information (in units of megabytes per second) that can be transferred across the external memory interface in one second. The number is worked out by multiplying the card's bus width by its memory speed. If it uses DDR memory, it must be multiplied by 2 once again. If DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The higher the memory bandwidth, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, HDR and high resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum amount of texture map elements (texels) that are applied in one second. This is calculated by multiplying the total amount of texture units of the card by the core clock speed of the chip. The better this number, 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 amount of pixels the graphics card could possibly record to its local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is worked out by multiplying the amount of ROPs by the the core speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also sometimes called Render Output Units) are responsible for filling the screen with pixels (the image). The actual pixel rate also depends on many other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the potential to reach the maximum fill rate.