GeForce 830M vs Radeon R9 290

Intro

Compare all that to the Radeon R9 290, which features a clock frequency of 800 MHz and a GDDR5 memory speed of 1250 MHz. It also makes use of a 512-bit bus, and uses a 28 nm design. It is comprised of 2560 SPUs, 160 Texture Address Units, and 64 ROPs.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce 830M		25 Watts
Radeon R9 290		300 Watts
	Difference: 275 Watts (1100%)

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically, the Radeon R9 290 should perform much faster than the GeForce 830M in general. (explain)

Radeon R9 290		320000 MB/sec
GeForce 830M		14400 MB/sec
	Difference: 305600 (2122%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon R9 290 will be much (about 677%) better at anisotropic filtering than the GeForce 830M. (explain)

Radeon R9 290		128000 Mtexels/sec
GeForce 830M		16464 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 111536 (677%)

Pixel Rate

If running with high levels of AA is important to you, then the Radeon R9 290 is the winner, and very much so. (explain)

Radeon R9 290		51200 Mpixels/sec
GeForce 830M		8232 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 42968 (522%)

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 max amount of information (in units of megabytes per second) that can be transferred over the external memory interface in a second. The number is worked out by multiplying the interface width by its memory clock speed. If it uses DDR memory, it should be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher the bandwidth is, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, High Dynamic Range and higher screen resolutions.

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

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels the video card could possibly write to its local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is worked out by multiplying the amount of Raster Operations Pipelines by the clock speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also sometimes called Render Output Units) are responsible for drawing the pixels (image) on the screen. The actual pixel fill rate also depends on many other factors, especially the memory bandwidth - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to get to the maximum fill rate.