GeForce GTS 150 vs Radeon HD 6790

Intro

Compare those specs to the Radeon HD 6790, which comes with clock speeds of 840 MHz on the GPU, and 1050 MHz on the 1024 MB of GDDR5 memory. It features 800 SPUs along with 40 TAUs and 16 Rasterization Operator Units.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce GTS 150		141 Watts
Radeon HD 6790		150 Watts
	Difference: 9 Watts (6%)

Memory Bandwidth

As far as performance goes, the Radeon HD 6790 should theoretically be much better than the GeForce GTS 150 in general. (explain)

Radeon HD 6790		134400 MB/sec
GeForce GTS 150		32000 MB/sec
	Difference: 102400 (320%)

Texel Rate

The GeForce GTS 150 will be much (about 41%) faster with regards to AF than the Radeon HD 6790. (explain)

GeForce GTS 150		47360 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 6790		33600 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 13760 (41%)

Pixel Rate

If running with a high resolution is important to you, then the Radeon HD 6790 is a better choice, not by a very large margin though. (explain)

Radeon HD 6790		13440 Mpixels/sec
GeForce GTS 150		11840 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 1600 (14%)

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: Memory bandwidth is the maximum amount of data (measured in megabytes per second) that can be transferred across the external memory interface within a second. It's calculated by multiplying the card's bus width by the speed of its memory. In the case of DDR RAM, it must be multiplied by 2 once again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher the memory bandwidth, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, High Dynamic Range and high resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum amount of texture map elements (texels) that are processed per second. This is calculated by multiplying the total texture units of the card by the core speed of the chip. The better the texel rate, the better the card will be at texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels processed in a second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum amount of pixels the video card can possibly record to the local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is worked out by multiplying the amount of colour ROPs by the the core clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also sometimes called Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel fill rate also depends on many other factors, especially the memory bandwidth - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the ability to reach the max fill rate.