GeForce 9800 GTX+ vs Radeon R9 M290X

Intro

Compare that to the Radeon R9 M290X, which has 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 Raster Operation Units.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon R9 M290X		100 Watts
GeForce 9800 GTX+		145 Watts
	Difference: 45 Watts (45%)

Memory Bandwidth

As far as performance goes, the Radeon R9 M290X should in theory be much superior to the GeForce 9800 GTX+ overall. (explain)

Radeon R9 M290X		153600 MB/sec
GeForce 9800 GTX+		70400 MB/sec
	Difference: 83200 (118%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon R9 M290X will be quite a bit (approximately 44%) more effective at anisotropic filtering than the GeForce 9800 GTX+. (explain)

Radeon R9 M290X		68000 Mtexels/sec
GeForce 9800 GTX+		47232 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 20768 (44%)

Pixel Rate

If using lots of anti-aliasing is important to you, then the Radeon R9 M290X is superior to the GeForce 9800 GTX+, and very much so. (explain)

Radeon R9 M290X		27200 Mpixels/sec
GeForce 9800 GTX+		11808 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 15392 (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 max amount of information (in units of megabytes per second) that can be transferred past the external memory interface within a second. It is worked out by multiplying the card's bus width by its memory clock speed. If it uses DDR type memory, it must be multiplied by 2 again. If DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The higher the bandwidth is, 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 texture map elements (texels) that can be processed per second. This figure is worked out by multiplying the total number of texture units by the core clock speed of the chip. The better this number, the better the graphics card will be at handling texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels applied per second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum number of pixels that the graphics card can possibly record to the local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is worked out by multiplying the amount of Render Output Units by the the card's clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - sometimes also referred to as Render Output Units) are responsible for filling the screen with pixels (the image). The actual pixel fill rate also depends on quite a few other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the potential to get to the maximum fill rate.