Nvidia Titan X vs Radeon R9 290

Intro

Compare all that to the Radeon R9 290, which comes with clock speeds of 800 MHz on the GPU, and 1250 MHz on the 4096 MB of GDDR5 memory. It features 2560 SPUs along with 160 Texture Address Units and 64 ROPs.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Nvidia Titan X		250 Watts
Radeon R9 290		300 Watts
	Difference: 50 Watts (20%)

Memory Bandwidth

The Nvidia Titan X, in theory, should perform a lot faster than the Radeon R9 290 in general. (explain)

Nvidia Titan X		491520 MB/sec
Radeon R9 290		320000 MB/sec
	Difference: 171520 (54%)

Texel Rate

The Nvidia Titan X will be quite a bit (approximately 148%) better at anisotropic filtering than the Radeon R9 290. (explain)

Nvidia Titan X		317408 Mtexels/sec
Radeon R9 290		128000 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 189408 (148%)

Pixel Rate

The Nvidia Titan X is much (approximately 166%) more effective at FSAA than the Radeon R9 290, and also will be capable of handling higher resolutions without losing too much performance. (explain)

Nvidia Titan X		136032 Mpixels/sec
Radeon R9 290		51200 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 84832 (166%)

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: Memory bandwidth is the maximum amount of data (counted in MB per second) that can be transported past the external memory interface in one second. The number is calculated by multiplying the card's interface width by the speed of its memory. In the case of DDR type RAM, the result should be multiplied by 2 once again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The better the bandwidth is, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, HDR and higher screen resolutions.

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

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels the graphics card could possibly record to the local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is calculated by multiplying the amount of Raster Operations Pipelines by the the card's clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - sometimes also referred to as Render Output Units) are responsible for filling the screen with pixels (the image). The actual pixel fill rate also depends 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 max fill rate.