GeForce GTX 590 vs Radeon R9 290

Intro

Compare that to the Radeon R9 290, which makes use of a 28 nm design. AMD has clocked the core speed at 800 MHz. The GDDR5 RAM is set to run at a speed of 1250 MHz on this particular card. It features 2560 SPUs as well as 160 TAUs and 64 ROPs.

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 590		6680 points
	Difference: 3196 (48%)

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

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

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically speaking, the GeForce GTX 590 is 3% quicker than the Radeon R9 290 in general, due to its higher bandwidth. (explain)

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

Texel Rate

The Radeon R9 290 should be much (about 65%) faster with regards to AF than the GeForce GTX 590. (explain)

Radeon R9 290		128000 Mtexels/sec
GeForce GTX 590		77696 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 50304 (65%)

Pixel Rate

If using high levels of AA is important to you, then the GeForce GTX 590 is superior to the Radeon R9 290, not by a very large margin though. (explain)

GeForce GTX 590		58272 Mpixels/sec
Radeon R9 290		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 across the external memory interface in a second. The number is calculated by multiplying the card's interface width by the speed of its memory. If it uses DDR type memory, it must be multiplied by 2 again. If DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The higher the memory bandwidth, the better 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 number of texture map elements (texels) that are processed per second. This is calculated by multiplying the total amount of texture units of the card by the core speed of the chip. The better this number, the better the graphics card will be at texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels per second.

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