Geforce GTX 670 vs Radeon R9 M290X

Intro

Compare all that to the Radeon R9 M290X, which uses a 28 nm design. AMD has clocked the core speed at 850 MHz. The GDDR5 memory runs at a speed of 1200 MHz on this particular model. It features 1280 SPUs as well as 80 Texture Address Units and 32 ROPs.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon R9 M290X		100 Watts
Geforce GTX 670		170 Watts
	Difference: 70 Watts (70%)

Memory Bandwidth

The Geforce GTX 670, in theory, should be a lot faster than the Radeon R9 M290X overall. (explain)

Geforce GTX 670		192000 MB/sec
Radeon R9 M290X		153600 MB/sec
	Difference: 38400 (25%)

Texel Rate

The Geforce GTX 670 will be quite a bit (approximately 51%) more effective at AF than the Radeon R9 M290X. (explain)

Geforce GTX 670		102480 Mtexels/sec
Radeon R9 M290X		68000 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 34480 (51%)

Pixel Rate

If using high levels of AA is important to you, then the Geforce GTX 670 is a better choice, though only just barely. (explain)

Geforce GTX 670		29280 Mpixels/sec
Radeon R9 M290X		27200 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 2080 (8%)

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 (counted in megabytes per second) that can be transported over the external memory interface in a second. It's worked out by multiplying the bus width by the speed of its memory. If the card has DDR RAM, it must be multiplied by 2 again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. 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 amount of texture map elements (texels) that are processed in one second. This figure is calculated by multiplying the total amount of texture units of the card by the core clock speed of the chip. The higher this number, the better the graphics card will be at handling texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels applied per second.

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