GeForce GTX 980 vs Radeon R9 290

Intro

Compare those specifications to the Radeon R9 290, which features clock 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

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 980		13552 points
Radeon R9 290		9876 points
	Difference: 3676 (37%)

Ethereum Mining Hash Rate

Radeon R9 290		29 Mh/s
GeForce GTX 980		20 Mh/s
	Difference: 9 (45%)

Zcash Mining Hash Rate

GeForce GTX 980		408 Sol/s
Radeon R9 290		283 Sol/s
	Difference: 125 (44%)

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce GTX 980		165 Watts
Radeon R9 290		300 Watts
	Difference: 135 Watts (82%)

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically speaking, the Radeon R9 290 will be 43% faster than the GeForce GTX 980 overall, because of its higher bandwidth. (explain)

Radeon R9 290		320000 MB/sec
GeForce GTX 980		224000 MB/sec
	Difference: 96000 (43%)

Texel Rate

The GeForce GTX 980 should be a bit (more or less 13%) better at anisotropic filtering than the Radeon R9 290. (explain)

GeForce GTX 980		144128 Mtexels/sec
Radeon R9 290		128000 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 16128 (13%)

Pixel Rate

If running with a high resolution is important to you, then the GeForce GTX 980 is superior to the Radeon R9 290, and very much so. (explain)

GeForce GTX 980		72064 Mpixels/sec
Radeon R9 290		51200 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 20864 (41%)

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 largest amount of information (measured in MB per second) that can be moved across the external memory interface in a second. The number is calculated by multiplying the card's interface width by its memory clock speed. In the case of DDR RAM, it should be multiplied by 2 again. If DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The higher the bandwidth is, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, High Dynamic Range and high resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum number of texture map elements (texels) that are applied in one second. This figure is calculated by multiplying the total texture units by the core clock speed of the chip. The better this number, 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 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 number of colour ROPs by the clock speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also sometimes called Render Output Units) are responsible for filling the screen with pixels (the image). The actual pixel rate also depends on quite a few other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the ability to reach the max fill rate.