Geforce GTX 690 vs Radeon R9 290

Intro

Compare those specifications to the Radeon R9 290, which features 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 TAUs and 64 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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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 690		13111 points
Radeon R9 290		9876 points
	Difference: 3235 (33%)

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Both cards have the same power consumption.

Memory Bandwidth

As far as performance goes, the Geforce GTX 690 should in theory be a bit better than the Radeon R9 290 in general. (explain)

Geforce GTX 690		384512 MB/sec
Radeon R9 290		320000 MB/sec
	Difference: 64512 (20%)

Texel Rate

The Geforce GTX 690 is quite a bit (about 83%) more effective at anisotropic filtering than the Radeon R9 290. (explain)

Geforce GTX 690		234240 Mtexels/sec
Radeon R9 290		128000 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 106240 (83%)

Pixel Rate

If using lots of anti-aliasing is important to you, then the Geforce GTX 690 is a better choice, but it probably won't make a huge difference. (explain)

Geforce GTX 690		58560 Mpixels/sec
Radeon R9 290		51200 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 7360 (14%)

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.

One or more cards in this comparison are multi-core. This means that their bandwidth, texel and pixel rates are theoretically doubled - this does not mean the card will actually perform twice as fast, but only that it should in theory be able to. Actual game benchmarks will give a more accurate idea of what it's capable of.

Price Comparison

Specifications

Memory Bandwidth: Bandwidth is the largest amount of information (counted in MB per second) that can be transported past the external memory interface in a second. It is worked out by multiplying the interface width by the speed of its memory. If it uses DDR type memory, it should be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The better the bandwidth is, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, High Dynamic Range and higher screen resolutions.

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

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum amount of pixels that the graphics card could possibly write to the local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is calculated by multiplying the amount of Raster Operations Pipelines by the the core clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also called Render Output Units) are responsible for drawing the pixels (image) on the screen. The actual pixel fill rate also depends on many other factors, especially the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to reach the maximum fill rate.