GeForce GTX 580 vs Radeon R9 M290X

Intro

Compare those specifications to the Radeon R9 M290X, which has a clock frequency of 850 MHz and a GDDR5 memory frequency of 1200 MHz. It also uses a 256-bit bus, and uses a 28 nm design. It is made up of 1280 SPUs, 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 580		244 Watts
	Difference: 144 Watts (144%)

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically, the GeForce GTX 580 should be much faster than the Radeon R9 M290X in general. (explain)

GeForce GTX 580		192384 MB/sec
Radeon R9 M290X		153600 MB/sec
	Difference: 38784 (25%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon R9 M290X will be a lot (about 38%) better at texture filtering than the GeForce GTX 580. (explain)

Radeon R9 M290X		68000 Mtexels/sec
GeForce GTX 580		49408 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 18592 (38%)

Pixel Rate

If using high levels of AA is important to you, then the GeForce GTX 580 is the winner, by far. (explain)

GeForce GTX 580		37056 Mpixels/sec
Radeon R9 M290X		27200 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 9856 (36%)

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 information (measured in megabytes per second) that can be moved across the external memory interface in one second. It is calculated by multiplying the card's bus width by the speed of its memory. If it uses DDR memory, the result should be multiplied by 2 once again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher the memory bandwidth, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, HDR and higher screen resolutions.

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

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum amount of pixels the graphics card could possibly write to its local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is calculated by multiplying the amount of ROPs by the clock speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - aka Render Output Units) are responsible for filling the screen with pixels (the image). The actual pixel fill rate is also dependant on quite a few other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to get to the maximum fill rate.