GeForce GTX 860M vs Radeon R9 M290X

Intro

Compare those specifications to the Radeon R9 M290X, which comes with clock speeds of 850 MHz on the GPU, and 1200 MHz on the 4096 MB of GDDR5 memory. It features 1280 SPUs along with 80 TAUs and 32 Rasterization Operator Units.

Display Graphs

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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

In theory, the Radeon R9 M290X will be 140% quicker than the GeForce GTX 860M overall, due to its higher bandwidth. (explain)

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

Texel Rate

The GeForce GTX 860M will be a bit (approximately 13%) faster with regards to texture filtering than the Radeon R9 M290X. (explain)

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

Pixel Rate

The Radeon R9 M290X should be quite a bit (approximately 113%) more effective at FSAA than the GeForce GTX 860M, and will be able to handle higher resolutions without slowing down too much. (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: Bandwidth is the max amount of data (measured in MB per second) that can be moved past the external memory interface within a second. The number is calculated by multiplying the bus width by its memory speed. If it uses DDR type memory, the result should be multiplied by 2 once again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The better the memory bandwidth, 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 amount of texture map elements (texels) that are processed in one second. This is worked out by multiplying the total number of texture units of the card by the core clock speed of the chip. The higher the texel rate, the better the 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 that the graphics chip could possibly write to its local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is calculated by multiplying the number of colour ROPs by the the core 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 fill rate is also dependant on quite a few other factors, especially the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the ability to get to the maximum fill rate.