GeForce 820M vs Radeon R9 290

Intro

Compare those specifications to the Radeon R9 290, which uses a 28 nm design. AMD has clocked the core speed at 800 MHz. The GDDR5 memory is set to run at a speed of 1250 MHz on this specific card. It features 2560 SPUs as well as 160 TAUs and 64 ROPs.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Benchmarks

These are real-world performance benchmarks that were submitted by Hardware Compare users. The scores seen here are the average of all benchmarks submitted for each respective test and hardware.

3DMark Fire Strike Graphics Score

Radeon R9 290		9876 points
GeForce 820M		850 points
	Difference: 9026 (1062%)

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce 820M		15 Watts
Radeon R9 290		300 Watts
	Difference: 285 Watts (1900%)

Memory Bandwidth

Performance-wise, the Radeon R9 290 should in theory be much superior to the GeForce 820M in general. (explain)

Radeon R9 290		320000 MB/sec
GeForce 820M		16000 MB/sec
	Difference: 304000 (1900%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon R9 290 will be quite a bit (more or less 1013%) more effective at anisotropic filtering than the GeForce 820M. (explain)

Radeon R9 290		128000 Mtexels/sec
GeForce 820M		11504 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 116496 (1013%)

Pixel Rate

If running with lots of anti-aliasing is important to you, then the Radeon R9 290 is superior to the GeForce 820M, by a large margin. (explain)

Radeon R9 290		51200 Mpixels/sec
GeForce 820M		2876 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 48324 (1680%)

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 maximum amount of information (in units of megabytes per second) that can be transported past the external memory interface within a second. It's worked out by multiplying the card's bus width by its memory clock speed. If it uses DDR memory, it should be multiplied by 2 again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher the memory bandwidth, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, HDR and high resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum number of 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 speed of the chip. The higher this number, the better the video card will be at texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels per second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum number of pixels that the graphics chip could possibly record to the local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is worked out by multiplying the amount of ROPs by the the core clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - aka Render Output Units) are responsible for filling the screen with pixels (the image). The actual pixel fill rate is also dependant on lots of other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the ability to get to the maximum fill rate.