GeForce 8800 Ultra vs Radeon R9 M290X

Intro

Compare those specs to the Radeon R9 M290X, which has a core clock frequency of 850 MHz and a GDDR5 memory speed of 1200 MHz. It also makes use of a 256-bit bus, and uses a 28 nm design. It features 1280 SPUs, 80 Texture Address Units, and 32 Raster Operation Units.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon R9 M290X		100 Watts
GeForce 8800 Ultra		171 Watts
	Difference: 71 Watts (71%)

Memory Bandwidth

Performance-wise, the Radeon R9 M290X should theoretically be much superior to the GeForce 8800 Ultra overall. (explain)

Radeon R9 M290X		153600 MB/sec
GeForce 8800 Ultra		103680 MB/sec
	Difference: 49920 (48%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon R9 M290X is quite a bit (more or less 74%) faster with regards to anisotropic filtering than the GeForce 8800 Ultra. (explain)

Radeon R9 M290X		68000 Mtexels/sec
GeForce 8800 Ultra		39168 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 28832 (74%)

Pixel Rate

If running with a high resolution is important to you, then the Radeon R9 M290X is the winner, by far. (explain)

Radeon R9 M290X		27200 Mpixels/sec
GeForce 8800 Ultra		14688 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 12512 (85%)

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 transported across the external memory interface in one second. It is worked out by multiplying the card's bus width by its memory clock speed. In the case of DDR type RAM, it must be multiplied by 2 again. If DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The higher the memory bandwidth, the better 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 amount of texture map elements (texels) that are processed per second. This number is worked out by multiplying the total number of texture units by the core clock 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 one second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum number of pixels that the graphics chip can possibly write to the local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is calculated by multiplying the amount of ROPs by the the card's clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - sometimes also referred to as Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel output rate is also dependant on many other factors, especially the memory bandwidth - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the potential to get to the max fill rate.