GeForce GTX 870M vs Radeon R9 290

Intro

Compare all that to the Radeon R9 290, which makes use of a 28 nm design. AMD has set the core frequency at 800 MHz. The GDDR5 RAM is set to run at a speed of 1250 MHz on this particular card. It features 2560 SPUs as well as 160 Texture Address Units and 64 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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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 GTX 870M		4770 points
	Difference: 5106 (107%)

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce GTX 870M		110 Watts
Radeon R9 290		300 Watts
	Difference: 190 Watts (173%)

Memory Bandwidth

As far as performance goes, the Radeon R9 290 should theoretically be quite a bit superior to the GeForce GTX 870M in general. (explain)

Radeon R9 290		320000 MB/sec
GeForce GTX 870M		96000 MB/sec
	Difference: 224000 (233%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon R9 290 should be quite a bit (approximately 21%) better at AF than the GeForce GTX 870M. (explain)

Radeon R9 290		128000 Mtexels/sec
GeForce GTX 870M		105392 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 22608 (21%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon R9 290 should be much (approximately 127%) more effective at anti-aliasing than the GeForce GTX 870M, and should be capable of handling higher screen resolutions without slowing down too much. (explain)

Radeon R9 290		51200 Mpixels/sec
GeForce GTX 870M		22584 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 28616 (127%)

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 (counted in megabytes per second) that can be transferred over the external memory interface in one second. The number is calculated by multiplying the card's bus width by its memory speed. In the case of DDR type memory, it should be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses 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 amount of texture map elements (texels) that are processed per second. This is calculated by multiplying the total amount of texture units of the card 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 in a second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum amount of pixels the graphics card can possibly write to the local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is worked out by multiplying the amount of colour ROPs by the the card's clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - sometimes also referred to as Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel rate is also dependant on lots of other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to get to the max fill rate.