GeForce GTX 295 vs Radeon HD 6790

Intro

Compare that to the Radeon HD 6790, which comes with a core clock speed of 840 MHz and a GDDR5 memory speed of 1050 MHz. It also features a 256-bit memory bus, and makes use of a 40 nm design. It is comprised of 800 SPUs, 40 Texture Address Units, and 16 Raster Operation Units.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon HD 6790		150 Watts
GeForce GTX 295		289 Watts
	Difference: 139 Watts (93%)

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically, the GeForce GTX 295 should perform a lot faster than the Radeon HD 6790 in general. (explain)

GeForce GTX 295		223776 MB/sec
Radeon HD 6790		134400 MB/sec
	Difference: 89376 (67%)

Texel Rate

The GeForce GTX 295 is a lot (approximately 174%) faster with regards to AF than the Radeon HD 6790. (explain)

GeForce GTX 295		92160 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 6790		33600 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 58560 (174%)

Pixel Rate

If using a high resolution is important to you, then the GeForce GTX 295 is a better choice, and very much so. (explain)

GeForce GTX 295		32256 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 6790		13440 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 18816 (140%)

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 information (in units of megabytes per second) that can be transferred over the external memory interface in a second. It's calculated by multiplying the bus width by its memory speed. In the case of DDR memory, it must be multiplied by 2 again. If DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The higher the card's memory bandwidth, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, HDR and high resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum amount of texture map elements (texels) that are processed per second. This figure is calculated by multiplying the total texture units by the core clock 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 processed in one second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum number of pixels the graphics card could possibly record to its local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is calculated by multiplying the amount of ROPs 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 fill rate also depends on lots of other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the ability to reach the max fill rate.