GeForce GTX Titan vs Radeon R9 290

Intro

Compare those specifications to the Radeon R9 290, which features a clock frequency of 800 MHz and a GDDR5 memory frequency of 1250 MHz. It also features a 512-bit memory bus, and uses a 28 nm design. It is made up of 2560 SPUs, 160 TAUs, and 64 Raster Operation 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.

3DMark Fire Strike Graphics Score

GeForce GTX Titan		10162 points
Radeon R9 290		9876 points
	Difference: 286 (3%)

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce GTX Titan		250 Watts
Radeon R9 290		300 Watts
	Difference: 50 Watts (20%)

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically, the Radeon R9 290 should perform a little bit faster than the GeForce GTX Titan overall. (explain)

Radeon R9 290		320000 MB/sec
GeForce GTX Titan		288384 MB/sec
	Difference: 31616 (11%)

Texel Rate

The GeForce GTX Titan is a lot (more or less 46%) faster with regards to texture filtering than the Radeon R9 290. (explain)

GeForce GTX Titan		187488 Mtexels/sec
Radeon R9 290		128000 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 59488 (46%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon R9 290 should be much (more or less 27%) better at AA than the GeForce GTX Titan, and also capable of handling higher resolutions while still performing well. (explain)

Radeon R9 290		51200 Mpixels/sec
GeForce GTX Titan		40176 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 11024 (27%)

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 max amount of information (counted in MB per second) that can be transported across the external memory interface in one second. It is calculated by multiplying the card's bus width by its memory clock speed. If it uses DDR RAM, it should be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The better the memory bandwidth, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, HDR and high resolutions.

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

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum amount of pixels that the graphics chip can possibly write to the local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is calculated by multiplying the number of ROPs by the the core speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also sometimes called Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel output rate is also dependant on quite a few other factors, especially the memory bandwidth - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the potential to get to the max fill rate.