GeForce 820M vs Radeon R9 M290X

Intro

Compare that to the Radeon R9 M290X, which features core 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

Hide Graphs

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce 820M		15 Watts
Radeon R9 M290X		100 Watts
	Difference: 85 Watts (567%)

Memory Bandwidth

Performance-wise, the Radeon R9 M290X should in theory be quite a bit superior to the GeForce 820M in general. (explain)

Radeon R9 M290X		153600 MB/sec
GeForce 820M		16000 MB/sec
	Difference: 137600 (860%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon R9 M290X should be quite a bit (about 491%) more effective at AF than the GeForce 820M. (explain)

Radeon R9 M290X		68000 Mtexels/sec
GeForce 820M		11504 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 56496 (491%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon R9 M290X is a lot (about 846%) more effective at full screen anti-aliasing than the GeForce 820M, and also able to handle higher screen resolutions while still performing well. (explain)

Radeon R9 M290X		27200 Mpixels/sec
GeForce 820M		2876 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 24324 (846%)

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 (in units of megabytes per second) that can be transferred over the external memory interface within a second. It is calculated by multiplying the interface width by its memory speed. In the case of DDR type RAM, it must be multiplied by 2 again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The better the memory bandwidth, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, HDR and higher screen resolutions.

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

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels that the graphics card can possibly write to the local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is calculated by multiplying the number of ROPs by the the core speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - sometimes also referred to as Render Output Units) are responsible for filling the screen with pixels (the image). The actual pixel output rate also depends on lots of other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the ability to get to the maximum fill rate.