GeForce 8800 GT 512MB vs Radeon R9 M290X

Intro

Compare that to the Radeon R9 M290X, which features 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 GT 512MB		105 Watts
	Difference: 5 Watts (5%)

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically speaking, the Radeon R9 M290X should perform much faster than the GeForce 8800 GT 512MB in general. (explain)

Radeon R9 M290X		153600 MB/sec
GeForce 8800 GT 512MB		57600 MB/sec
	Difference: 96000 (167%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon R9 M290X should be quite a bit (about 102%) faster with regards to anisotropic filtering than the GeForce 8800 GT 512MB. (explain)

Radeon R9 M290X		68000 Mtexels/sec
GeForce 8800 GT 512MB		33600 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 34400 (102%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon R9 M290X should be a lot (more or less 183%) faster with regards to anti-aliasing than the GeForce 8800 GT 512MB, and will be capable of handling higher resolutions without slowing down too much. (explain)

Radeon R9 M290X		27200 Mpixels/sec
GeForce 8800 GT 512MB		9600 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 17600 (183%)

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 (measured in MB per second) that can be transferred over the external memory interface in a second. It is worked out by multiplying the interface width by the speed of its memory. If it uses DDR type memory, it should be multiplied by 2 once again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The higher the memory bandwidth, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, HDR and high resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum number of texture map elements (texels) that are applied per second. This number is worked out by multiplying the total number of texture units by the core speed of the chip. The higher the texel rate, the better the graphics 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 most pixels the graphics card could possibly record to its local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is worked out by multiplying the number of ROPs by the the core clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also sometimes called Render Output Units) are responsible for filling the screen with pixels (the image). The actual pixel 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 reach the max fill rate.