GeForce GTX 560 Ti vs Radeon R9 M290X

Intro

Compare those specifications to the Radeon R9 M290X, which features 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 Rasterization Operator Units.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon R9 M290X		100 Watts
GeForce GTX 560 Ti		170 Watts
	Difference: 70 Watts (70%)

Memory Bandwidth

The Radeon R9 M290X, in theory, should be a little bit faster than the GeForce GTX 560 Ti in general. (explain)

Radeon R9 M290X		153600 MB/sec
GeForce GTX 560 Ti		128256 MB/sec
	Difference: 25344 (20%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon R9 M290X will be much (about 29%) more effective at texture filtering than the GeForce GTX 560 Ti. (explain)

Radeon R9 M290X		68000 Mtexels/sec
GeForce GTX 560 Ti		52608 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 15392 (29%)

Pixel Rate

If running with lots of anti-aliasing is important to you, then the Radeon R9 M290X is the winner, but not by far. (explain)

Radeon R9 M290X		27200 Mpixels/sec
GeForce GTX 560 Ti		26304 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 896 (3%)

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 max amount of information (counted in megabytes per second) that can be transported across the external memory interface in a second. The number is calculated by multiplying the card's bus width by its memory clock speed. If the card has DDR RAM, the result should be multiplied by 2 once again. If DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The better the bandwidth is, the faster 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 texture map elements (texels) that are applied per second. This number is calculated by multiplying the total amount of texture units of the card by the core speed of the chip. The higher this number, the better the video card will be at texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels in one second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels that the graphics chip can possibly write to its local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure 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 outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel fill rate is also dependant on lots of other factors, especially the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the potential to get to the maximum fill rate.