AMD Radeon R9 290X vs NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1060 Mobile

AMD Radeon R9 290X

The AMD Radeon R9 290X is a high-end single-GPU graphics card for desktop PCs, that has been presented in October 2013. It is based on the "Hawaii" GPU and manufactured in 28 nanometers. The card offers 2816 shader units and a 512-bit memory interface (4 GB GDDR5, 320 GB/s at 5000 MHz).

Architecture

The Hawaii chip is based on a slightly revised version of the GCN architecture. Among other things, the front-end has been doubled and optimized, size and speed of the L2 cache increased and the memory interface widened. Furthermore, the R9 290X offers more shaders (2816), TMUs (176) and ROPs (64) than the previous top model Radeon HD 7970. In addition to the higher performance, the 290X supports new features like DirectX 12 (FL 12_0).

Performance

Depending on game and settings, the performance of the Radeon R9 290X is similar to the Nvidia GeForce GTX Titan. Therefore, even the fastest mobile GPUs like the GeForce GTX 780M are outperformed by about 50 percent. Demanding games like Metro: Last Light can be played fluently in 2560 x 1600 pixels and maximum settings. In some cases, even the UltraHD resolution of 3840 x 2160 (4K) is possible.

Features

The R9 290X supports well-known features like Eyefinity, but also some innovations such as True Audio and a new turbo mode. Depending on power consumption and temperature, the core can be boosted up to 1000 MHz. However, there is no offical base clock respectively a lower limit.

Power Consumption

Thanks to dynamic clock adjustments and the Zero Core technology, the R9 290X is very energy efficient while idle. Under load, the card is rated at a typical power consumption of 250 watts.

NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1060 Mobile

The mobile Nvidia GeForce GTX 1060 is a graphics card for high end laptops. It is based on the Pascal architecture and manufactured in 16 nm FinFET at TSMC. The GPU is using the smaller GP106 chip. Compared to the desktop version of the GTX 1060, the laptop version offers the same amount of shaders but slightly lower clock rates. The TDP is slightly less than the old GTX 970M (predecessor).

For thin and light laptops Nvidia offer a Max-Q called version of the GTX 1060 with lower TDP and also significantly lower performance. Sadly this variant im sold with the same GTX 1060 name, making it hard to judge the performance.

The performance of the mobile GTX 1060 is a few percent below a reference GTX 1060 desktop card. In our benchmark so far (no max-Q version) the mobile GTX 1060 was somewhere between -1 and -16% slower than a desktop variant. A comprehensive review of the dekstop GeForce GTX 1060 Founders Edition with 6 GB GDDR5 can be found here. Therefore, the card is most suited for Full HD or WQHD gaming in high to maximum details (see benchmarks below).

The GP106 chip is produced in 16nm FinFET at TSMC and offers a range of new features, like DisplayPort 1.4 (ready), HDMI 2.0b, HDR, Simultaneous Multi-Projection (SMP) and improved H.265 video de- and encoding (PlayReady 3.0). A list of improvements and features can be found in our article on the Pascal architecture.

The power consumption is specified with a TGP of 80 Watt and therefore slightly below the old GTX 970M. Since summer 2017 a low power variant (Max-Q) is available for thin and light laptops with reduced performance and a lower TGP of 60 - 70 Watt.