GeForce GTX 470 vs Radeon R9 M290X

Intro

Compare all that to the Radeon R9 M290X, which uses a 28 nm design. AMD has set the core frequency at 850 MHz. The GDDR5 memory is set to run at a frequency of 1200 MHz on this card. It features 1280 SPUs as well as 80 TAUs and 32 ROPs.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon R9 M290X		100 Watts
GeForce GTX 470		215 Watts
	Difference: 115 Watts (115%)

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically speaking, the Radeon R9 M290X should be a small bit faster than the GeForce GTX 470 in general. (explain)

Radeon R9 M290X		153600 MB/sec
GeForce GTX 470		133920 MB/sec
	Difference: 19680 (15%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon R9 M290X is a lot (approximately 100%) better at anisotropic filtering than the GeForce GTX 470. (explain)

Radeon R9 M290X		68000 Mtexels/sec
GeForce GTX 470		33992 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 34008 (100%)

Pixel Rate

If using a high resolution is important to you, then the Radeon R9 M290X is the winner, but it probably won't make a huge difference. (explain)

Radeon R9 M290X		27200 Mpixels/sec
GeForce GTX 470		24280 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 2920 (12%)

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 max amount of data (in units of MB per second) that can be transported past the external memory interface in a second. It is calculated by multiplying the bus width by its memory speed. If it uses DDR RAM, it should be multiplied by 2 again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. 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 texture map elements (texels) that are processed in one second. This number is calculated by multiplying the total number of texture units of the card by the core clock speed of the chip. The higher the texel rate, the better the video card will be at handling texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels applied per second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum number of pixels that the graphics chip can possibly record to the local memory in a 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 - sometimes also referred to as Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel rate also depends on many other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to reach the max fill rate.