GeForce 9800 GTX+ vs Radeon R9 M290X

Intro

Compare those specs to the Radeon R9 M290X, which features clock speeds of 850 MHz on the GPU, and 1200 MHz on the 4096 MB of GDDR5 memory. It features 1280 SPUs along with 80 Texture Address Units and 32 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon R9 M290X		100 Watts
GeForce 9800 GTX+		145 Watts
	Difference: 45 Watts (45%)

Memory Bandwidth

In theory, the Radeon R9 M290X should be 118% quicker than the GeForce 9800 GTX+ in general, because of its higher data rate. (explain)

Radeon R9 M290X		153600 MB/sec
GeForce 9800 GTX+		70400 MB/sec
	Difference: 83200 (118%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon R9 M290X should be quite a bit (about 44%) faster with regards to anisotropic filtering than the GeForce 9800 GTX+. (explain)

Radeon R9 M290X		68000 Mtexels/sec
GeForce 9800 GTX+		47232 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 20768 (44%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon R9 M290X is much (approximately 130%) better at anti-aliasing than the GeForce 9800 GTX+, and also capable of handling higher resolutions better. (explain)

Radeon R9 M290X		27200 Mpixels/sec
GeForce 9800 GTX+		11808 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 15392 (130%)

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 data (counted in MB per second) that can be transferred past the external memory interface in one second. It's calculated by multiplying the card's bus width by its memory clock speed. In the case of DDR type RAM, the result should be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The better the memory bandwidth, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, HDR and high resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum amount of texture map elements (texels) that can be applied in one second. This is worked out by multiplying the total texture units by the core clock speed of the chip. The better this number, the better the graphics card will be at texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels processed in a second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels the video card could possibly record to its local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is calculated by multiplying the number of Render Output Units by the the core speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - aka 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 bandwidth is, the lower the potential to reach the max fill rate.