Geforce GTX 690 vs Radeon R9 290

Intro

Compare those specifications to the Radeon R9 290, which comes with a core clock speed of 800 MHz and a GDDR5 memory speed of 1250 MHz. It also uses a 512-bit memory bus, and uses a 28 nm design. It is made up of 2560 SPUs, 160 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

Geforce GTX 690		13111 points
Radeon R9 290		9876 points
	Difference: 3235 (33%)

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Both cards have the same power consumption.

Memory Bandwidth

In theory, the Geforce GTX 690 should be 20% faster than the Radeon R9 290 overall, due to its higher bandwidth. (explain)

Geforce GTX 690		384512 MB/sec
Radeon R9 290		320000 MB/sec
	Difference: 64512 (20%)

Texel Rate

The Geforce GTX 690 is much (approximately 83%) better at texture filtering than the Radeon R9 290. (explain)

Geforce GTX 690		234240 Mtexels/sec
Radeon R9 290		128000 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 106240 (83%)

Pixel Rate

If running with lots of anti-aliasing is important to you, then the Geforce GTX 690 is superior to the Radeon R9 290, but it probably won't make a huge difference. (explain)

Geforce GTX 690		58560 Mpixels/sec
Radeon R9 290		51200 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 7360 (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 largest amount of information (in units of megabytes per second) that can be moved past the external memory interface within a second. It is calculated by multiplying the bus width by its memory speed. If the card has DDR memory, it must be multiplied by 2 again. If DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The higher the card's memory bandwidth, the better 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 amount of texture map elements (texels) that are applied in one second. This is calculated by multiplying the total texture units by the core speed of the chip. The higher this number, the better the card will be at texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels in a second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum amount of pixels the graphics card could possibly record to the local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is calculated by multiplying the amount of Render Output Units by the the core speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also sometimes called Render Output Units) are responsible for drawing the pixels (image) on the screen. The actual pixel fill rate is also dependant on quite a few other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the ability to reach the max fill rate.