Nvidia Titan X vs Radeon R9 290X

Intro

Compare those specifications to the Radeon R9 290X, which comes with clock speeds of 800 MHz on the GPU, and 1250 MHz on the 4096 MB of GDDR5 memory. It features 2816 SPUs along with 176 TAUs and 64 Rasterization Operator Units.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

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

Memory Bandwidth

In theory, the Nvidia Titan X is 54% quicker than the Radeon R9 290X in general, because of its higher bandwidth. (explain)

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

Texel Rate

The Nvidia Titan X will be a lot (approximately 125%) better at anisotropic filtering than the Radeon R9 290X. (explain)

Nvidia Titan X		317408 Mtexels/sec
Radeon R9 290X		140800 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 176608 (125%)

Pixel Rate

The Nvidia Titan X is much (more or less 166%) more effective at anti-aliasing than the Radeon R9 290X, and also will be able to handle higher resolutions better. (explain)

Nvidia Titan X		136032 Mpixels/sec
Radeon R9 290X		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 transferred across the external memory interface in a second. It is worked out by multiplying the interface width by the speed of its memory. In the case of DDR RAM, it should be multiplied by 2 again. If DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The higher the card's 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 texture map elements (texels) that can be processed per second. This is calculated by multiplying the total texture units of the card by the core clock 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 in a second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels that the graphics card could possibly record to the local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is worked out by multiplying the number of colour ROPs by the the card's clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also sometimes called Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel fill rate is also dependant on quite a few 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.