GeForce GTS 150 vs Radeon R9 M290X

Intro

Compare all of that to the Radeon R9 M290X, which has clock speeds of 850 MHz on the GPU, and 1200 MHz on the 4096 MB of GDDR5 memory. It features 1280 SPUs along with 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 GTS 150		141 Watts
	Difference: 41 Watts (41%)

Memory Bandwidth

The Radeon R9 M290X, in theory, should perform a lot faster than the GeForce GTS 150 overall. (explain)

Radeon R9 M290X		153600 MB/sec
GeForce GTS 150		32000 MB/sec
	Difference: 121600 (380%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon R9 M290X should be much (approximately 44%) faster with regards to texture filtering than the GeForce GTS 150. (explain)

Radeon R9 M290X		68000 Mtexels/sec
GeForce GTS 150		47360 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 20640 (44%)

Pixel Rate

If running with high levels of AA is important to you, then the Radeon R9 M290X is a better choice, by far. (explain)

Radeon R9 M290X		27200 Mpixels/sec
GeForce GTS 150		11840 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 15360 (130%)

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 maximum amount of information (counted in MB per second) that can be transferred over the external memory interface within a second. The number is calculated by multiplying the card's bus width by its memory clock speed. In the case of DDR type memory, it should be multiplied by 2 again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The better the card's memory bandwidth, 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 can be applied in one second. This number is calculated by multiplying the total texture units of the card by the core speed of the chip. The better this number, the better the card will be at handling texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels per second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum amount of pixels the video card could possibly write to the local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is calculated by multiplying the amount of colour ROPs by the clock speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also sometimes called Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel output rate also depends on quite a few other factors, especially the memory bandwidth - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the ability to get to the max fill rate.