GeForce GTX 980 Ti vs Radeon R9 290

Intro

Compare those specs to the Radeon R9 290, which uses a 28 nm design. AMD has set the core frequency at 800 MHz. The GDDR5 RAM is set to run at a speed of 1250 MHz on this card. It features 2560 SPUs as well as 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 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

Theoretically, the GeForce GTX 980 Ti should be a little bit faster 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 a lot (approximately 38%) more effective at texture filtering 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 should be much (more or less 88%) faster with regards to anti-aliasing than the Radeon R9 290, and will be able to handle higher screen 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: Memory bandwidth is the largest amount of data (counted in MB per second) that can be moved across the external memory interface within a second. The number is calculated by multiplying the bus width by its memory clock speed. If the card has DDR RAM, the result should be multiplied by 2 again. If DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The higher the memory bandwidth, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, HDR and high resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum number of texture map elements (texels) that are applied in one second. This number is calculated by multiplying the total number of texture units by the core clock speed of the chip. The better the texel rate, the better the graphics card will be at handling texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels in one second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum number of pixels the video card could possibly write to the local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is worked out by multiplying the number of Raster Operations Pipelines by the the core speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - sometimes also referred to as Render Output Units) are responsible for filling the screen with pixels (the image). The actual pixel output rate is also dependant on quite a few other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to reach the max fill rate.