GeForce GTS 450 vs Radeon R9 M290X

Intro

Compare all of that to the Radeon R9 M290X, which has a GPU core clock speed of 850 MHz, and 4096 MB of GDDR5 RAM running at 1200 MHz through a 256-bit bus. It also is comprised of 1280 Stream Processors, 80 Texture Address Units, and 32 Raster Operation Units.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon R9 M290X		100 Watts
GeForce GTS 450		106 Watts
	Difference: 6 Watts (6%)

Memory Bandwidth

In theory, the Radeon R9 M290X should perform a lot faster than the GeForce GTS 450 overall. (explain)

Radeon R9 M290X		153600 MB/sec
GeForce GTS 450		57728 MB/sec
	Difference: 95872 (166%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon R9 M290X should be a lot (more or less 171%) more effective at texture filtering than the GeForce GTS 450. (explain)

Radeon R9 M290X		68000 Mtexels/sec
GeForce GTS 450		25056 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 42944 (171%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon R9 M290X will be much (more or less 117%) more effective at AA than the GeForce GTS 450, and will be able to handle higher screen resolutions more effectively. (explain)

Radeon R9 M290X		27200 Mpixels/sec
GeForce GTS 450		12528 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 14672 (117%)

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 largest amount of information (counted in MB per second) that can be transferred across the external memory interface within a second. The number is worked out by multiplying the interface width by the speed of its memory. If it uses DDR memory, it must be multiplied by 2 once again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The better the bandwidth is, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, High Dynamic Range and high resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum amount of texture map elements (texels) that can be processed per second. This number is worked out by multiplying the total number of texture units 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 in a second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels the video card can possibly record to the local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is worked out by multiplying the number of colour ROPs by the the card's clock speed. 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 lots of other factors, especially the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to get to the maximum fill rate.