GeForce 8800 GTX vs Radeon R9 M290X

Intro

Compare all that to the Radeon R9 M290X, which has core clock speeds of 850 MHz on the GPU, and 1200 MHz on the 4096 MB of GDDR5 RAM. It features 1280 SPUs as well as 80 Texture Address Units and 32 Rasterization Operator Units.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon R9 M290X		100 Watts
GeForce 8800 GTX		155 Watts
	Difference: 55 Watts (55%)

Memory Bandwidth

In theory, the Radeon R9 M290X should be 78% faster than the GeForce 8800 GTX in general, due to its greater bandwidth. (explain)

Radeon R9 M290X		153600 MB/sec
GeForce 8800 GTX		86400 MB/sec
	Difference: 67200 (78%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon R9 M290X should be quite a bit (more or less 85%) more effective at AF than the GeForce 8800 GTX. (explain)

Radeon R9 M290X		68000 Mtexels/sec
GeForce 8800 GTX		36800 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 31200 (85%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon R9 M290X is quite a bit (approximately 97%) faster with regards to anti-aliasing than the GeForce 8800 GTX, and also able to handle higher resolutions while still performing well. (explain)

Radeon R9 M290X		27200 Mpixels/sec
GeForce 8800 GTX		13800 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 13400 (97%)

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 data (in units of megabytes per second) that can be moved across the external memory interface within a second. It's worked out by multiplying the card's interface width by its memory speed. If it uses DDR memory, the result should be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The higher the memory bandwidth, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, HDR and higher screen resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum texture map elements (texels) that are processed per second. This is calculated by multiplying the total amount of texture units of the card 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 processed in one second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels the graphics card could possibly write to its local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is worked out by multiplying the amount of Raster Operations Pipelines by the the core speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also called Render Output Units) are responsible for filling the screen with pixels (the image). The actual pixel output rate is also dependant on lots of other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to reach the maximum fill rate.