GeForce GTX 965M vs Radeon R9 290

Intro

Compare all of that to the Radeon R9 290, which makes use of a 28 nm design. AMD has clocked the core speed at 800 MHz. The GDDR5 memory works 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

Radeon R9 290		9876 points
GeForce GTX 965M		5650 points
	Difference: 4226 (75%)

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce GTX 965M		60 Watts
Radeon R9 290		300 Watts
	Difference: 240 Watts (400%)

Memory Bandwidth

In theory, the Radeon R9 290 is 400% faster than the GeForce GTX 965M in general, due to its greater bandwidth. (explain)

Radeon R9 290		320000 MB/sec
GeForce GTX 965M		64000 MB/sec
	Difference: 256000 (400%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon R9 290 should be much (approximately 112%) more effective at anisotropic filtering than the GeForce GTX 965M. (explain)

Radeon R9 290		128000 Mtexels/sec
GeForce GTX 965M		60416 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 67584 (112%)

Pixel Rate

If running with high levels of AA is important to you, then the Radeon R9 290 is a better choice, by far. (explain)

Radeon R9 290		51200 Mpixels/sec
GeForce GTX 965M		30208 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 20992 (69%)

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 maximum amount of information (measured in MB per second) that can be moved past the external memory interface within a second. The number is calculated by multiplying the card's interface width by its memory speed. If the card has DDR type RAM, it should be multiplied by 2 once again. If DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The better the memory bandwidth, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, HDR and higher screen resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum texture map elements (texels) that are processed per second. This figure is calculated by multiplying the total amount of 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 in one second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum number of pixels that the graphics card can possibly write to its local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is worked out by multiplying the amount of colour ROPs by the the core speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - aka Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel output rate also depends on quite a few other factors, especially the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the ability to reach the maximum fill rate.