GeForce GTX 870M vs Radeon R9 M290X

Intro

Compare all that to the Radeon R9 M290X, which features a clock speed of 850 MHz and a GDDR5 memory speed of 1200 MHz. It also makes use of a 256-bit memory bus, and makes use of a 28 nm design. It features 1280 SPUs, 80 Texture Address Units, and 32 Raster Operation Units.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon R9 M290X		100 Watts
GeForce GTX 870M		110 Watts
	Difference: 10 Watts (10%)

Memory Bandwidth

The Radeon R9 M290X should theoretically be a lot faster than the GeForce GTX 870M in general. (explain)

Radeon R9 M290X		153600 MB/sec
GeForce GTX 870M		96000 MB/sec
	Difference: 57600 (60%)

Texel Rate

The GeForce GTX 870M will be a lot (more or less 55%) more effective at AF than the Radeon R9 M290X. (explain)

GeForce GTX 870M		105392 Mtexels/sec
Radeon R9 M290X		68000 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 37392 (55%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon R9 M290X is a little bit (more or less 20%) better at AA than the GeForce GTX 870M, and also will be capable of handling higher screen resolutions more effectively. (explain)

Radeon R9 M290X		27200 Mpixels/sec
GeForce GTX 870M		22584 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 4616 (20%)

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 data (measured in MB per second) that can be moved past the external memory interface within a second. The number is calculated by multiplying the card's bus width by the speed of its memory. In the case of DDR memory, it must be multiplied by 2 once again. If DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The better the memory bandwidth, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, High Dynamic Range and high resolutions.

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

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