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GeForce GTX 275 vs Radeon R9 M290X

Intro

The GeForce GTX 275 uses a 55 nm design. nVidia has clocked the core speed at 633 MHz. The GDDR3 RAM is set to run at a speed of 1134 MHz on this particular card. It features 240 SPUs as well as 80 Texture Address Units and 28 Rasterization Operator Units.

Compare all that to the Radeon R9 M290X, which comes with a core clock speed 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 ROPs.

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon R9 M290X		100 Watts
GeForce GTX 275		219 Watts
	Difference: 119 Watts (119%)

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically, the Radeon R9 M290X should perform much faster than the GeForce GTX 275 overall. (explain)

Radeon R9 M290X		153600 MB/sec
GeForce GTX 275		127008 MB/sec
	Difference: 26592 (21%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon R9 M290X should be much (approximately 34%) more effective at AF than the GeForce GTX 275. (explain)

Radeon R9 M290X		68000 Mtexels/sec
GeForce GTX 275		50640 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 17360 (34%)

Pixel Rate

If running with a high screen resolution is important to you, then the Radeon R9 M290X is a better choice, by a large margin. (explain)

Radeon R9 M290X		27200 Mpixels/sec
GeForce GTX 275		17724 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 9476 (53%)

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

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GeForce GTX 275

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Radeon R9 M290X

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Specifications

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Model	GeForce GTX 275	Radeon R9 M290X
Manufacturer	nVidia	AMD
Year	April 9, 2009	May 1 2014
Code Name	G200b	Neptune XT
Memory	896 MB	4096 MB
Core Speed	633 MHz	850 MHz
Memory Speed	2268 MHz	4800 MHz
Power (Max TDP)	219 watts	100 watts
Bandwidth	127008 MB/sec	153600 MB/sec
Texel Rate	50640 Mtexels/sec	68000 Mtexels/sec
Pixel Rate	17724 Mpixels/sec	27200 Mpixels/sec
Unified Shaders	240	1280
Texture Mapping Units	80	80
Render Output Units	28	32
Bus Type	GDDR3	GDDR5
Bus Width	448-bit	256-bit
Fab Process	55 nm	28 nm
Transistors	1400 million	(Unknown) million
Bus	PCIe x16 2.0	PCIe 3.0 x16
DirectX Version	DirectX 10	DirectX 11.2
OpenGL Version	OpenGL 3.1	OpenGL 4.3

Memory Bandwidth: Bandwidth is the largest amount of data (measured in megabytes per second) that can be transported past the external memory interface in a second. It is calculated by multiplying the card's interface width by the speed of its memory. If it uses DDR type RAM, it should be multiplied by 2 once again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The better the bandwidth is, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, High Dynamic Range and high resolutions.

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

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum amount of pixels that the graphics card can possibly record to its local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure 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 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 reach the max fill rate.

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