GeForce GTX 980M vs Radeon R9 290

Intro

Compare those specifications to the Radeon R9 290, which comes with GPU clock speed of 800 MHz, and 4096 MB of GDDR5 RAM set to run at 1250 MHz through a 512-bit bus. It also is made up of 2560 Stream Processors, 160 TAUs, and 64 Raster Operation Units.

Display Graphs

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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 980M		9476 points
	Difference: 400 (4%)

Zcash Mining Hash Rate

Radeon R9 290		283 Sol/s
GeForce GTX 980M		155 Sol/s
	Difference: 128 (83%)

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce GTX 980M		100 Watts
Radeon R9 290		300 Watts
	Difference: 200 Watts (200%)

Memory Bandwidth

Performance-wise, the Radeon R9 290 should in theory be a lot better than the GeForce GTX 980M overall. (explain)

Radeon R9 290		320000 MB/sec
GeForce GTX 980M		128000 MB/sec
	Difference: 192000 (150%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon R9 290 is quite a bit (approximately 28%) more effective at anisotropic filtering than the GeForce GTX 980M. (explain)

Radeon R9 290		128000 Mtexels/sec
GeForce GTX 980M		99648 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 28352 (28%)

Pixel Rate

The GeForce GTX 980M will be much (more or less 30%) more effective at full screen anti-aliasing than the Radeon R9 290, and should be able to handle higher resolutions better. (explain)

GeForce GTX 980M		66432 Mpixels/sec
Radeon R9 290		51200 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 15232 (30%)

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 data (measured in megabytes per second) that can be transferred past the external memory interface in one second. It's calculated by multiplying the bus width by its memory speed. If it uses DDR type RAM, the result should be multiplied by 2 once again. If DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The better the card's memory bandwidth, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, HDR and high resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum texture map elements (texels) that can be applied per second. This number is worked out by multiplying the total texture units by the core speed of the chip. The better this number, the better the video card will be at texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels processed in one second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels the video card could possibly record to the local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate 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 drawing the pixels (image) on the screen. The actual pixel fill rate also depends on quite a few other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the ability to reach the maximum fill rate.