GeForce GTX 1050 vs Radeon R9 290

Intro

Compare those specifications to the Radeon R9 290, which features a clock speed 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 1050		6657 points
	Difference: 3219 (48%)

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce GTX 1050		75 Watts
Radeon R9 290		300 Watts
	Difference: 225 Watts (300%)

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically speaking, the Radeon R9 290 should be 179% quicker than the GeForce GTX 1050 in general, because of its greater bandwidth. (explain)

Radeon R9 290		320000 MB/sec
GeForce GTX 1050		114688 MB/sec
	Difference: 205312 (179%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon R9 290 is quite a bit (about 136%) more effective at texture filtering than the GeForce GTX 1050. (explain)

Radeon R9 290		128000 Mtexels/sec
GeForce GTX 1050		54160 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 73840 (136%)

Pixel Rate

If using a high screen resolution is important to you, then the Radeon R9 290 is the winner, not by a very large margin though. (explain)

Radeon R9 290		51200 Mpixels/sec
GeForce GTX 1050		43328 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 7872 (18%)

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 (measured in megabytes per second) that can be moved across the external memory interface in one second. The number is worked out by multiplying the bus width by its memory clock speed. If the card has DDR RAM, the result should be multiplied by 2 again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher the bandwidth is, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, High Dynamic Range and higher screen resolutions.

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

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels that the graphics chip can possibly write to the local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is calculated by multiplying the amount of Render Output Units by the clock speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also called Render Output Units) are responsible for drawing the pixels (image) on the screen. The actual pixel rate also depends on lots of other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to get to the max fill rate.