GeForce GTX 980M vs Radeon R9 290

Intro

Compare those specs to the Radeon R9 290, which features a clock speed of 800 MHz and a GDDR5 memory speed of 1250 MHz. It also makes use of a 512-bit memory bus, and makes use of a 28 nm design. It is comprised of 2560 SPUs, 160 Texture Address Units, and 64 Raster Operation 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

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 theoretically be a lot superior to 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 will be a lot (about 28%) faster with regards to 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 should be much (approximately 30%) better at full screen anti-aliasing than the Radeon R9 290, and should be capable of handling higher resolutions while still performing well. (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: Memory bandwidth is the max amount of information (measured in MB per second) that can be moved across the external memory interface in one second. It's worked out by multiplying the interface width by its memory clock speed. In the case of DDR memory, the result should be multiplied by 2 again. If DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The better the memory bandwidth, the faster 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 processed in one second. This figure is worked out 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 processed in a second.

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