GeForce 8800 GT 512MB vs Radeon R9 M290X

Intro

Compare that to the Radeon R9 M290X, which comes with core 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

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon R9 M290X		100 Watts
GeForce 8800 GT 512MB		105 Watts
	Difference: 5 Watts (5%)

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically speaking, the Radeon R9 M290X will be 167% faster than the GeForce 8800 GT 512MB in general, due to its greater bandwidth. (explain)

Radeon R9 M290X		153600 MB/sec
GeForce 8800 GT 512MB		57600 MB/sec
	Difference: 96000 (167%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon R9 M290X is quite a bit (approximately 102%) faster with regards to anisotropic filtering than the GeForce 8800 GT 512MB. (explain)

Radeon R9 M290X		68000 Mtexels/sec
GeForce 8800 GT 512MB		33600 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 34400 (102%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon R9 M290X is quite a bit (more or less 183%) faster with regards to FSAA than the GeForce 8800 GT 512MB, and should be able to handle higher resolutions without losing too much performance. (explain)

Radeon R9 M290X		27200 Mpixels/sec
GeForce 8800 GT 512MB		9600 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 17600 (183%)

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 largest amount of information (counted in megabytes per second) that can be transported past the external memory interface in one second. It is worked out by multiplying the card's interface width by its memory speed. If the card has DDR memory, it must be multiplied by 2 again. If DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The better the card's memory bandwidth, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, High Dynamic Range and higher screen resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum texture map elements (texels) that can be applied per second. This figure 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 video card will be at handling texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels applied per second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum number of pixels the video 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 Render Output Units by the the core speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - aka Render Output Units) are responsible for drawing the pixels (image) on the screen. The actual pixel rate also depends on lots of other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the ability to reach the maximum fill rate.