GeForce GTX 860M vs Radeon R9 M290X

Intro

Compare all that to the Radeon R9 M290X, which makes use of a 28 nm design. AMD has set the core speed at 850 MHz. The GDDR5 memory is set to run at a frequency of 1200 MHz on this particular card. It features 1280 SPUs as well as 80 Texture Address Units and 32 ROPs.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce GTX 860M		45 Watts
Radeon R9 M290X		100 Watts
	Difference: 55 Watts (122%)

Memory Bandwidth

The Radeon R9 M290X, in theory, should be much faster than the GeForce GTX 860M overall. (explain)

Radeon R9 M290X		153600 MB/sec
GeForce GTX 860M		64000 MB/sec
	Difference: 89600 (140%)

Texel Rate

The GeForce GTX 860M should be a small bit (approximately 13%) more effective at anisotropic filtering than the Radeon R9 M290X. (explain)

GeForce GTX 860M		76512 Mtexels/sec
Radeon R9 M290X		68000 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 8512 (13%)

Pixel Rate

If running with a high resolution is important to you, then the Radeon R9 M290X is a better choice, and very much so. (explain)

Radeon R9 M290X		27200 Mpixels/sec
GeForce GTX 860M		12752 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 14448 (113%)

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: Memory bandwidth is the max amount of information (in units of MB per second) that can be transported over the external memory interface in one second. It is calculated by multiplying the interface width by its memory speed. If the card has DDR type RAM, it must be multiplied by 2 once again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The better the bandwidth is, 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 texture map elements (texels) that are applied in one second. This number is worked out by multiplying the total number of texture units 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 processed per second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum number of pixels that the graphics chip can possibly write to its local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is calculated by multiplying the amount of ROPs by the clock speed of the card. 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 rate also depends on lots of other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to reach the maximum fill rate.