GeForce GTX 870M vs Radeon R9 290

Intro

Compare those specs to the Radeon R9 290, which comes with a clock frequency of 800 MHz and a GDDR5 memory speed of 1250 MHz. It also uses a 512-bit memory bus, and makes use of a 28 nm design. It is made up of 2560 SPUs, 160 Texture Address Units, and 64 Raster Operation Units.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Benchmarks

These are real-world performance benchmarks that were submitted by Hardware Compare users. The scores seen here are the average of all benchmarks submitted for each respective test and hardware.

3DMark Fire Strike Graphics Score

Radeon R9 290		9876 points
GeForce GTX 870M		4770 points
	Difference: 5106 (107%)

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce GTX 870M		110 Watts
Radeon R9 290		300 Watts
	Difference: 190 Watts (173%)

Memory Bandwidth

The Radeon R9 290 should theoretically perform quite a bit faster than the GeForce GTX 870M overall. (explain)

Radeon R9 290		320000 MB/sec
GeForce GTX 870M		96000 MB/sec
	Difference: 224000 (233%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon R9 290 should be quite a bit (approximately 21%) more effective at texture filtering than the GeForce GTX 870M. (explain)

Radeon R9 290		128000 Mtexels/sec
GeForce GTX 870M		105392 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 22608 (21%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon R9 290 should be a lot (about 127%) more effective at FSAA than the GeForce GTX 870M, and also capable of handling higher screen resolutions without slowing down too much. (explain)

Radeon R9 290		51200 Mpixels/sec
GeForce GTX 870M		22584 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 28616 (127%)

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 data (measured in megabytes per second) that can be transferred over the external memory interface in one second. It's worked out by multiplying the bus width by the speed of its memory. In the case of DDR RAM, the result should be multiplied by 2 once again. If DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The higher the memory bandwidth, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, High Dynamic Range and higher screen resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum texture map elements (texels) that are processed in one second. This figure is worked out by multiplying the total amount of texture units by the core clock speed of the chip. The higher the texel rate, the better the card will be at texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels processed per second.

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