GeForce GTX 880M vs Radeon R9 M290X

Intro

Compare that to the Radeon R9 M290X, which comes with a clock speed of 850 MHz and a GDDR5 memory speed of 1200 MHz. It also makes use of a 256-bit bus, and makes use of a 28 nm design. It is comprised of 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 880M		130 Watts
	Difference: 30 Watts (30%)

Memory Bandwidth

In theory, the Radeon R9 M290X should perform a bit faster than the GeForce GTX 880M in general. (explain)

Radeon R9 M290X		153600 MB/sec
GeForce GTX 880M		128000 MB/sec
	Difference: 25600 (20%)

Texel Rate

The GeForce GTX 880M should be a lot (about 80%) faster with regards to anisotropic filtering than the Radeon R9 M290X. (explain)

GeForce GTX 880M		122112 Mtexels/sec
Radeon R9 M290X		68000 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 54112 (80%)

Pixel Rate

The GeForce GTX 880M should be just a bit (more or less 12%) faster with regards to full screen anti-aliasing than the Radeon R9 M290X, and also should be capable of handling higher resolutions without slowing down too much. (explain)

GeForce GTX 880M		30528 Mpixels/sec
Radeon R9 M290X		27200 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 3328 (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: Bandwidth is the largest amount of information (measured in megabytes per second) that can be transferred across the external memory interface in one second. It's calculated by multiplying the card's interface width by its memory clock speed. If the card has DDR type memory, the result should be multiplied by 2 again. If DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The better the bandwidth is, the faster 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 applied in one second. This is calculated by multiplying the total number of texture units of the card by the core speed of the chip. The better this number, 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 amount of pixels that the graphics card could possibly record to the local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is calculated by multiplying the number of Render Output Units by the the card's clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also called Render Output Units) are responsible for filling the screen with pixels (the image). The actual pixel fill rate also depends on quite a few other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the ability to get to the max fill rate.