GeForce GTX 590 vs Radeon R9 M290X

Intro

Compare all of that to the Radeon R9 M290X, which has a core clock speed of 850 MHz and a GDDR5 memory speed of 1200 MHz. It also uses a 256-bit bus, and makes use of a 28 nm design. It features 1280 SPUs, 80 Texture Address Units, and 32 ROPs.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon R9 M290X		100 Watts
GeForce GTX 590		365 Watts
	Difference: 265 Watts (265%)

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically speaking, the GeForce GTX 590 should be 114% faster than the Radeon R9 M290X overall, because of its greater data rate. (explain)

GeForce GTX 590		328320 MB/sec
Radeon R9 M290X		153600 MB/sec
	Difference: 174720 (114%)

Texel Rate

The GeForce GTX 590 is a bit (approximately 14%) better at texture filtering than the Radeon R9 M290X. (explain)

GeForce GTX 590		77696 Mtexels/sec
Radeon R9 M290X		68000 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 9696 (14%)

Pixel Rate

The GeForce GTX 590 will be quite a bit (about 114%) better at full screen anti-aliasing than the Radeon R9 M290X, and also able to handle higher resolutions without losing too much performance. (explain)

GeForce GTX 590		58272 Mpixels/sec
Radeon R9 M290X		27200 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 31072 (114%)

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 data (measured in megabytes per second) that can be transferred past the external memory interface in one second. It is calculated by multiplying the card's bus width by its memory clock speed. If it uses DDR type memory, it must be multiplied by 2 again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher 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 texture map elements (texels) that can be applied per second. This number is worked out by multiplying the total texture units of the card by the core clock speed of the chip. The better this number, the better the graphics card will be at handling texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels in one second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum number of pixels that the graphics chip can possibly write to its local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is calculated by multiplying the number of colour ROPs by the the core speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also 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 of the card - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the ability to get to the max fill rate.