GeForce 8800 Ultra vs Radeon HD 6790

Intro

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 RAM works at a speed of 1050 MHz on this particular card. It features 800 SPUs along with 40 TAUs and 16 Rasterization Operator Units.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon HD 6790		150 Watts
GeForce 8800 Ultra		171 Watts
	Difference: 21 Watts (14%)

Memory Bandwidth

In theory, the Radeon HD 6790 should be quite a bit faster than the GeForce 8800 Ultra in general. (explain)

Radeon HD 6790		134400 MB/sec
GeForce 8800 Ultra		103680 MB/sec
	Difference: 30720 (30%)

Texel Rate

The GeForce 8800 Ultra is a bit (approximately 17%) more effective at anisotropic filtering than the Radeon HD 6790. (explain)

GeForce 8800 Ultra		39168 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 6790		33600 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 5568 (17%)

Pixel Rate

If using lots of anti-aliasing is important to you, then the GeForce 8800 Ultra is a better choice, but it probably won't make a huge difference. (explain)

GeForce 8800 Ultra		14688 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 6790		13440 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 1248 (9%)

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: Bandwidth is the largest amount of information (in units of MB per second) that can be moved over the external memory interface in a second. It is worked out by multiplying the card's bus width by its memory clock speed. If the card has DDR memory, the result should be multiplied by 2 again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher the bandwidth is, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, High Dynamic Range and higher screen resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum number of texture map elements (texels) that are processed per second. This figure is calculated by multiplying the total number of texture units of the card by the core speed of the chip. The better the texel rate, the better the video card will be at 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 could possibly record to the local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is calculated by multiplying the number of Raster Operations Pipelines by the the card's clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also called 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 - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the potential to get to the max fill rate.