GeForce GTX 880M vs Radeon R9 M290X

Intro

Compare all that to the Radeon R9 M290X, which comes with core clock speeds of 850 MHz on the GPU, and 1200 MHz on the 4096 MB of GDDR5 RAM. It features 1280 SPUs as well as 80 TAUs and 32 Rasterization Operator Units.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon R9 M290X		100 Watts
GeForce GTX 880M		130 Watts
	Difference: 30 Watts (30%)

Memory Bandwidth

The Radeon R9 M290X should theoretically perform just a bit faster than the GeForce GTX 880M overall. (explain)

Radeon R9 M290X		153600 MB/sec
GeForce GTX 880M		128000 MB/sec
	Difference: 25600 (20%)

Texel Rate

The GeForce GTX 880M should be much (about 80%) faster with regards to texture filtering than the Radeon R9 M290X. (explain)

GeForce GTX 880M		122112 Mtexels/sec
Radeon R9 M290X		68000 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 54112 (80%)

Pixel Rate

The GeForce GTX 880M should be a bit (about 12%) faster with regards to anti-aliasing than the Radeon R9 M290X, and should be able to handle higher screen resolutions more effectively. (explain)

GeForce GTX 880M		30528 Mpixels/sec
Radeon R9 M290X		27200 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 3328 (12%)

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 MB per second) that can be transferred past the external memory interface in one second. The number is calculated by multiplying the bus width by its memory speed. If it uses DDR RAM, the result should be multiplied by 2 once 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, High Dynamic Range and higher screen resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum amount of texture map elements (texels) that can be processed in one second. This is calculated by multiplying the total number of 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 processed per second.

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