GeForce GTX 285 1GB vs Radeon HD 6790

Intro

The GeForce GTX 285 1GB uses a 55 nm design. nVidia has set the core speed at 648 MHz. The GDDR3 memory is set to run at a frequency of 1242 MHz on this model. It features 240 SPUs along with 80 Texture Address Units and 32 Rasterization Operator Units.

Compare those specs to the Radeon HD 6790, which makes use of a 40 nm design. AMD has clocked the core frequency at 840 MHz. The GDDR5 RAM runs at a speed of 1050 MHz on this model. It features 800 SPUs as well as 40 TAUs and 16 ROPs.

Price Comparison

Specifications

Memory Bandwidth: Bandwidth is the maximum amount of information (in units of MB per second) that can be transported over the external memory interface in a second. It is calculated by multiplying the card's interface width by its memory clock speed. If it uses DDR memory, the result should be multiplied by 2 once again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The higher the memory bandwidth, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, High Dynamic Range and high resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum texture map elements (texels) that are applied per second. This figure is worked out by multiplying the total texture units of the card by the core clock speed of the chip. The better the texel rate, the better the graphics card will be at handling texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels per second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels that the graphics card can possibly write to its local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is calculated by multiplying the amount of colour ROPs by the clock speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also called 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, especially the memory bandwidth - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the ability to reach the maximum fill rate.