GeForce GTX Titan Black vs Radeon R9 290

Intro

Compare those specifications to the Radeon R9 290, which has a clock frequency of 800 MHz and a GDDR5 memory speed of 1250 MHz. It also makes use of a 512-bit bus, and uses a 28 nm design. It is made up of 2560 SPUs, 160 Texture Address Units, and 64 ROPs.

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 Black		11666 points
Radeon R9 290		9876 points
	Difference: 1790 (18%)

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

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

Memory Bandwidth

As far as performance goes, the GeForce GTX Titan Black should theoretically be a bit better than the Radeon R9 290 overall. (explain)

GeForce GTX Titan Black		336000 MB/sec
Radeon R9 290		320000 MB/sec
	Difference: 16000 (5%)

Texel Rate

The GeForce GTX Titan Black is a lot (approximately 67%) more effective at AF than the Radeon R9 290. (explain)

GeForce GTX Titan Black		213360 Mtexels/sec
Radeon R9 290		128000 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 85360 (67%)

Pixel Rate

If running with a high resolution is important to you, then the Radeon R9 290 is a better choice, though only just barely. (explain)

Radeon R9 290		51200 Mpixels/sec
GeForce GTX Titan Black		42672 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 8528 (20%)

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 data (in units of MB per second) that can be transferred over the external memory interface within a second. It is calculated by multiplying the card's interface width by its memory clock speed. In the case of DDR type RAM, it must be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher the bandwidth is, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, High Dynamic Range and higher screen resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum amount of texture map elements (texels) that are processed in one second. This figure is calculated by multiplying the total texture units by the core speed of the chip. The higher this number, the better the card will be at 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 could possibly write to its local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is worked out by multiplying the number of Render Output Units by the clock 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 many other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the potential to reach the max fill rate.