GeForce GTX 470 vs Radeon R9 M290X

Intro

Compare all that to the Radeon R9 M290X, which has a clock frequency of 850 MHz and a GDDR5 memory speed of 1200 MHz. It also uses a 256-bit memory bus, and uses a 28 nm design. It is made up of 1280 SPUs, 80 TAUs, and 32 Raster Operation Units.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon R9 M290X		100 Watts
GeForce GTX 470		215 Watts
	Difference: 115 Watts (115%)

Memory Bandwidth

The Radeon R9 M290X, in theory, should be just a bit faster than the GeForce GTX 470 in general. (explain)

Radeon R9 M290X		153600 MB/sec
GeForce GTX 470		133920 MB/sec
	Difference: 19680 (15%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon R9 M290X will be quite a bit (approximately 100%) more effective at anisotropic filtering than the GeForce GTX 470. (explain)

Radeon R9 M290X		68000 Mtexels/sec
GeForce GTX 470		33992 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 34008 (100%)

Pixel Rate

If using lots of anti-aliasing is important to you, then the Radeon R9 M290X is superior to the GeForce GTX 470, though only just barely. (explain)

Radeon R9 M290X		27200 Mpixels/sec
GeForce GTX 470		24280 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 2920 (12%)

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 information (in units of MB per second) that can be moved past the external memory interface within a second. The number is worked out by multiplying the card's bus width by its memory speed. In the case of DDR RAM, it must be multiplied by 2 again. If DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The higher the bandwidth is, 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 are applied in one second. This is worked out by multiplying the total texture units by the core 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 processed in a second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum amount of pixels the graphics card could possibly record to the local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is calculated by multiplying the amount of 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 many 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.