GeForce GTX 285 1GB vs Radeon HD 6790

Intro

The GeForce GTX 285 1GB makes use of a 55 nm design. nVidia has clocked the core frequency at 648 MHz. The GDDR3 RAM works at a frequency of 1242 MHz on this specific model. It features 240 SPUs along with 80 Texture Address Units and 32 Rasterization Operator Units.

Compare those specifications to the Radeon HD 6790, which makes use of a 40 nm design. AMD has set the core frequency at 840 MHz. The GDDR5 memory works at a speed of 1050 MHz on this particular model. It features 800 SPUs as well as 40 Texture Address Units and 16 ROPs.

Price Comparison

Specifications

Memory Bandwidth: Memory bandwidth is the maximum amount of data (counted in megabytes per second) that can be transferred over the external memory interface in one second. The number is calculated by multiplying the bus width by its memory clock speed. In the case of DDR memory, it should be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The better the bandwidth is, 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 number of texture map elements (texels) that can be processed per second. This number is worked out by multiplying the total number of 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 texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels processed in one second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels that the graphics card could possibly write to its local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is worked out 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 lots of other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the potential to reach the maximum fill rate.