GeForce GTX 970 vs Radeon R9 M290X

Intro

Compare those specs to the Radeon R9 M290X, which features GPU clock speed of 850 MHz, and 4096 MB of GDDR5 memory set to run at 1200 MHz through a 256-bit bus. It also is made up of 1280 Stream Processors, 80 Texture Address Units, and 32 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon R9 M290X		100 Watts
GeForce GTX 970		145 Watts
	Difference: 45 Watts (45%)

Memory Bandwidth

The GeForce GTX 970 should in theory perform a lot faster than the Radeon R9 M290X overall. (explain)

GeForce GTX 970		224000 MB/sec
Radeon R9 M290X		153600 MB/sec
	Difference: 70400 (46%)

Texel Rate

The GeForce GTX 970 is much (approximately 61%) faster with regards to texture filtering than the Radeon R9 M290X. (explain)

GeForce GTX 970		109200 Mtexels/sec
Radeon R9 M290X		68000 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 41200 (61%)

Pixel Rate

If running with a high screen resolution is important to you, then the GeForce GTX 970 is superior to the Radeon R9 M290X, and very much so. (explain)

GeForce GTX 970		67200 Mpixels/sec
Radeon R9 M290X		27200 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 40000 (147%)

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 max amount of data (measured in megabytes per second) that can be moved over the external memory interface within a second. It's worked out by multiplying the bus width by the speed of its memory. If the card has DDR memory, the result should be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The higher the memory bandwidth, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, HDR and high resolutions.

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

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum amount of pixels that the graphics chip could possibly record to its local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is worked out by multiplying the number of Render Output Units by the the core clock speed. 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 is also dependant on lots of other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the ability to get to the max fill rate.