GeForce GTX 570 vs Radeon R9 M290X

Intro

Compare all that to the Radeon R9 M290X, which makes use of a 28 nm design. AMD has clocked the core frequency at 850 MHz. The GDDR5 memory runs at a speed of 1200 MHz on this card. It features 1280 SPUs as well as 80 TAUs and 32 Rasterization Operator Units.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon R9 M290X		100 Watts
GeForce GTX 570		219 Watts
	Difference: 119 Watts (119%)

Memory Bandwidth

In theory, the Radeon R9 M290X will be 1% faster than the GeForce GTX 570 overall, due to its higher bandwidth. (explain)

Radeon R9 M290X		153600 MB/sec
GeForce GTX 570		152000 MB/sec
	Difference: 1600 (1%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon R9 M290X is quite a bit (more or less 55%) better at AF than the GeForce GTX 570. (explain)

Radeon R9 M290X		68000 Mtexels/sec
GeForce GTX 570		43920 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 24080 (55%)

Pixel Rate

If running with lots of anti-aliasing is important to you, then the GeForce GTX 570 is the winner, but it probably won't make a huge difference. (explain)

GeForce GTX 570		29280 Mpixels/sec
Radeon R9 M290X		27200 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 2080 (8%)

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: Memory bandwidth is the maximum amount of information (counted in MB per second) that can be moved past the external memory interface in one second. It is worked out by multiplying the card's interface width by the speed of its memory. If the card has DDR memory, it must be multiplied by 2 again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher the memory bandwidth, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, HDR and higher screen resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum number of texture map elements (texels) that can be processed per second. This is worked out by multiplying the total amount of texture units of the card by the core speed of the chip. The higher this number, the better the video 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 most pixels the video card can possibly record to its local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is worked out by multiplying the number of ROPs by the clock speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - sometimes also referred to as Render Output Units) are responsible for filling the screen with pixels (the image). The actual pixel output rate also depends on quite a few other factors, especially the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the potential to reach the max fill rate.