GeForce GTX 590 vs Radeon R9 290X

Intro

Compare those specifications to the Radeon R9 290X, which comes with clock speeds of 800 MHz on the GPU, and 1250 MHz on the 4096 MB of GDDR5 memory. It features 2816 SPUs as well as 176 Texture Address Units and 64 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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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 290X		10609 points
GeForce GTX 590		6680 points
	Difference: 3929 (59%)

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon R9 290X		300 Watts
GeForce GTX 590		365 Watts
	Difference: 65 Watts (22%)

Memory Bandwidth

The GeForce GTX 590 should theoretically perform a little bit faster than the Radeon R9 290X in general. (explain)

GeForce GTX 590		328320 MB/sec
Radeon R9 290X		320000 MB/sec
	Difference: 8320 (3%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon R9 290X will be quite a bit (about 81%) more effective at AF than the GeForce GTX 590. (explain)

Radeon R9 290X		140800 Mtexels/sec
GeForce GTX 590		77696 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 63104 (81%)

Pixel Rate

The GeForce GTX 590 will be a little bit (about 14%) better at AA than the Radeon R9 290X, and also will be capable of handling higher resolutions without slowing down too much. (explain)

GeForce GTX 590		58272 Mpixels/sec
Radeon R9 290X		51200 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 7072 (14%)

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.

One or more cards in this comparison are multi-core. This means that their bandwidth, texel and pixel rates are theoretically doubled - this does not mean the card will actually perform twice as fast, but only that it should in theory be able to. Actual game benchmarks will give a more accurate idea of what it's capable of.

Price Comparison

Specifications

Memory Bandwidth: Bandwidth is the maximum amount of information (in units of megabytes per second) that can be moved over the external memory interface within a second. It's worked out by multiplying the interface width by its memory speed. If it uses DDR type RAM, it should be multiplied by 2 once again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The better the memory bandwidth, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, HDR and higher screen resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum texture map elements (texels) that can be applied per 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 graphics 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 amount of pixels the video card could possibly write to the local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is calculated by multiplying the number of colour ROPs by the clock speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also sometimes called Render Output Units) are responsible for filling the screen with pixels (the image). The actual pixel output rate also depends on many other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the ability to get to the maximum fill rate.