GeForce GTX 295 vs Radeon R9 M290X

Intro

Compare those specifications to the Radeon R9 M290X, which comes with a GPU core 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 Raster Operation Units.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon R9 M290X		100 Watts
GeForce GTX 295		289 Watts
	Difference: 189 Watts (189%)

Memory Bandwidth

Performance-wise, the GeForce GTX 295 should theoretically be much better than the Radeon R9 M290X in general. (explain)

GeForce GTX 295		223776 MB/sec
Radeon R9 M290X		153600 MB/sec
	Difference: 70176 (46%)

Texel Rate

The GeForce GTX 295 will be a lot (about 36%) better at anisotropic filtering than the Radeon R9 M290X. (explain)

GeForce GTX 295		92160 Mtexels/sec
Radeon R9 M290X		68000 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 24160 (36%)

Pixel Rate

The GeForce GTX 295 is a bit (about 19%) more effective at FSAA than the Radeon R9 M290X, and capable of handling higher screen resolutions without slowing down too much. (explain)

GeForce GTX 295		32256 Mpixels/sec
Radeon R9 M290X		27200 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 5056 (19%)

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.

One or more cards in this comparison are multi-core. This means that their bandwidth, texel and pixel rates are theoretically doubled - this does not mean the card will actually perform twice as fast, but only that it should in theory be able to. Actual game benchmarks will give a more accurate idea of what it's capable of.

Price Comparison

Specifications

Memory Bandwidth: Memory bandwidth is the largest amount of data (in units of megabytes per second) that can be transported past the external memory interface in one second. It's worked out by multiplying the bus width by its memory speed. In the case of DDR memory, the result should be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher the card's 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 processed in one second. This figure is worked out by multiplying the total texture units of the card by the core speed of the chip. The higher this number, the better the video 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 most pixels that the graphics card can possibly write to its local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is calculated 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 many other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the ability to reach the max fill rate.