GeForce GTX 1060 vs Radeon R9 290

Intro

Compare that to the Radeon R9 290, which makes use of a 28 nm design. AMD has clocked the core frequency at 800 MHz. The GDDR5 memory is set to run at a speed of 1250 MHz on this specific card. It features 2560 SPUs along with 160 Texture Address Units and 64 Rasterization Operator Units.

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.

Zcash Mining Hash Rate

GeForce GTX 1060		311 Sol/s
Radeon R9 290		283 Sol/s
	Difference: 28 (10%)

3DMark Fire Strike Graphics Score

GeForce GTX 1060		12359 points
Radeon R9 290		9876 points
	Difference: 2483 (25%)

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce GTX 1060		120 Watts
Radeon R9 290		300 Watts
	Difference: 180 Watts (150%)

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically speaking, the Radeon R9 290 is 63% faster than the GeForce GTX 1060 overall, due to its higher bandwidth. (explain)

Radeon R9 290		320000 MB/sec
GeForce GTX 1060		196608 MB/sec
	Difference: 123392 (63%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon R9 290 should be a little bit (more or less 6%) faster with regards to anisotropic filtering than the GeForce GTX 1060. (explain)

Radeon R9 290		128000 Mtexels/sec
GeForce GTX 1060		120480 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 7520 (6%)

Pixel Rate

The GeForce GTX 1060 should be much (about 41%) better at AA than the Radeon R9 290, and also should be able to handle higher resolutions without losing too much performance. (explain)

GeForce GTX 1060		72288 Mpixels/sec
Radeon R9 290		51200 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 21088 (41%)

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 (counted in megabytes per second) that can be transported over the external memory interface within a second. It's calculated by multiplying the interface width by its memory speed. In the case of DDR memory, the result should be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The better 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 amount of texture map elements (texels) that can be applied in one second. This number is worked out by multiplying the total 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 handling texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels applied per second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels that the graphics chip can possibly write to its local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is worked out by multiplying the amount of Render Output Units by the the core clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also called Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel rate also depends on quite a few other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the ability to get to the max fill rate.