GeForce 8800 GTS (G80) 320MB vs Radeon R9 M290X

Intro

Compare those specs to the Radeon R9 M290X, which comes with GPU clock speed of 850 MHz, and 4096 MB of GDDR5 RAM running at 1200 MHz through a 256-bit bus. It also features 1280 SPUs, 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 8800 GTS (G80) 320MB		143 Watts
	Difference: 43 Watts (43%)

Memory Bandwidth

The Radeon R9 M290X should theoretically be quite a bit faster than the GeForce 8800 GTS (G80) 320MB overall. (explain)

Radeon R9 M290X		153600 MB/sec
GeForce 8800 GTS (G80) 320MB		63360 MB/sec
	Difference: 90240 (142%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon R9 M290X will be a lot (about 176%) better at AF than the GeForce 8800 GTS (G80) 320MB. (explain)

Radeon R9 M290X		68000 Mtexels/sec
GeForce 8800 GTS (G80) 320MB		24624 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 43376 (176%)

Pixel Rate

If using lots of anti-aliasing is important to you, then the Radeon R9 M290X is a better choice, by far. (explain)

Radeon R9 M290X		27200 Mpixels/sec
GeForce 8800 GTS (G80) 320MB		10260 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 16940 (165%)

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 data (counted in MB per second) that can be transferred past the external memory interface in one second. It's worked out by multiplying the interface width by its memory speed. If the card has DDR RAM, it should be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher the card's memory bandwidth, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, HDR and higher screen resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum texture map elements (texels) that are applied per second. This figure is calculated by multiplying the total texture units of the card by the core clock speed of the chip. The higher the texel rate, the better the video card will be at handling texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels applied in a second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum number of pixels that the graphics chip can possibly write to its local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is worked out by multiplying the number of colour ROPs by the the core speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also called Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel output rate also depends on many other factors, especially the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the ability to get to the max fill rate.