GeForce GTX 1660 Ti vs Radeon R9 290

Intro

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

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce GTX 1660 Ti		120 Watts
Radeon R9 290		300 Watts
	Difference: 180 Watts (150%)

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically speaking, the Radeon R9 290 should perform a little bit faster than the GeForce GTX 1660 Ti overall. (explain)

Radeon R9 290		320000 MB/sec
GeForce GTX 1660 Ti		294912 MB/sec
	Difference: 25088 (9%)

Texel Rate

The GeForce GTX 1660 Ti should be just a bit (approximately 13%) better at anisotropic filtering than the Radeon R9 290. (explain)

GeForce GTX 1660 Ti		144000 Mtexels/sec
Radeon R9 290		128000 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 16000 (13%)

Pixel Rate

The GeForce GTX 1660 Ti should be much (more or less 41%) better at AA than the Radeon R9 290, and also able to handle higher screen resolutions more effectively. (explain)

GeForce GTX 1660 Ti		72000 Mpixels/sec
Radeon R9 290		51200 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 20800 (41%)

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 information (in units of megabytes per second) that can be transferred past the external memory interface in a second. It's calculated by multiplying the card's bus width by its memory speed. If it uses DDR RAM, the result should be multiplied by 2 again. If DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The better the memory bandwidth, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, HDR and high resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum amount of texture map elements (texels) that are applied in one second. This number is calculated by multiplying the total number of texture units of the card by the core clock 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 applied in one second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum number of pixels the video card can possibly write to its local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is calculated by multiplying the amount of Render Output Units by the the core 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, especially the memory bandwidth - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the potential to reach the maximum fill rate.