GeForce GTX 1050 3GB vs Radeon R9 290

Intro

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

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce GTX 1050 3GB		75 Watts
Radeon R9 290		300 Watts
	Difference: 225 Watts (300%)

Memory Bandwidth

In theory, the Radeon R9 290 should perform much faster than the GeForce GTX 1050 3GB in general. (explain)

Radeon R9 290		320000 MB/sec
GeForce GTX 1050 3GB		86016 MB/sec
	Difference: 233984 (272%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon R9 290 will be much (approximately 92%) more effective at anisotropic filtering than the GeForce GTX 1050 3GB. (explain)

Radeon R9 290		128000 Mtexels/sec
GeForce GTX 1050 3GB		66816 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 61184 (92%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon R9 290 is much (approximately 53%) faster with regards to full screen anti-aliasing than the GeForce GTX 1050 3GB, and also will be able to handle higher screen resolutions better. (explain)

Radeon R9 290		51200 Mpixels/sec
GeForce GTX 1050 3GB		33408 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 17792 (53%)

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 max amount of information (measured in megabytes per second) that can be transferred over the external memory interface in a second. It is worked out by multiplying the card's bus width by its memory speed. If it uses DDR type RAM, it should be multiplied by 2 once again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The higher 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 amount of texture map elements (texels) that are processed per second. This figure is worked out by multiplying the total texture units by the core clock speed of the chip. The higher this number, the better the video card will be at handling texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels per second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels the video card can possibly write to the local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is worked out by multiplying the amount of colour ROPs by the clock speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also called Render Output Units) are responsible for filling the screen with pixels (the image). The actual pixel rate also depends on many other factors, especially the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the potential to reach the max fill rate.