GeForce GTX 980 Ti vs Radeon R9 290

Intro

Compare that to the Radeon R9 290, which uses a 28 nm design. AMD has set the core speed at 800 MHz. The GDDR5 RAM is set to run at a speed of 1250 MHz on this particular card. It features 2560 SPUs along with 160 Texture Address Units and 64 Rasterization Operator 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 980 Ti		17120 points
Radeon R9 290		9876 points
	Difference: 7244 (73%)

Zcash Mining Hash Rate

GeForce GTX 980 Ti		425 Sol/s
Radeon R9 290		283 Sol/s
	Difference: 142 (50%)

Ethereum Mining Hash Rate

Radeon R9 290		29 Mh/s
GeForce GTX 980 Ti		22 Mh/s
	Difference: 7 (32%)

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce GTX 980 Ti		250 Watts
Radeon R9 290		300 Watts
	Difference: 50 Watts (20%)

Memory Bandwidth

Performance-wise, the GeForce GTX 980 Ti should theoretically be a small bit better than the Radeon R9 290 overall. (explain)

GeForce GTX 980 Ti		336000 MB/sec
Radeon R9 290		320000 MB/sec
	Difference: 16000 (5%)

Texel Rate

The GeForce GTX 980 Ti is much (about 38%) better at AF than the Radeon R9 290. (explain)

GeForce GTX 980 Ti		176000 Mtexels/sec
Radeon R9 290		128000 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 48000 (38%)

Pixel Rate

The GeForce GTX 980 Ti is a lot (about 88%) better at full screen anti-aliasing than the Radeon R9 290, and also will be capable of handling higher resolutions without losing too much performance. (explain)

GeForce GTX 980 Ti		96000 Mpixels/sec
Radeon R9 290		51200 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 44800 (88%)

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 transferred over the external memory interface in one second. It's worked out by multiplying the bus width by its memory clock speed. If it uses DDR type memory, it must be multiplied by 2 once again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher the card's memory bandwidth, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, HDR and higher screen resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum amount of texture map elements (texels) that are applied per second. This figure is calculated by multiplying the total texture units by the core speed of the chip. The higher the texel rate, 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 maximum number of pixels that the graphics card could possibly record to the local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is worked out by multiplying the amount of ROPs by the clock speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - sometimes also referred to as Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel fill rate also depends on quite a few other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the ability to get to the maximum fill rate.