GeForce 8800 GS vs Radeon HD 6790

Intro

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

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce 8800 GS		105 Watts
Radeon HD 6790		150 Watts
	Difference: 45 Watts (43%)

Memory Bandwidth

Performance-wise, the Radeon HD 6790 should in theory be much superior to the GeForce 8800 GS overall. (explain)

Radeon HD 6790		134400 MB/sec
GeForce 8800 GS		38400 MB/sec
	Difference: 96000 (250%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 6790 should be a lot (about 27%) faster with regards to anisotropic filtering than the GeForce 8800 GS. (explain)

Radeon HD 6790		33600 Mtexels/sec
GeForce 8800 GS		26400 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 7200 (27%)

Pixel Rate

If running with a high resolution is important to you, then the Radeon HD 6790 is the winner, by a large margin. (explain)

Radeon HD 6790		13440 Mpixels/sec
GeForce 8800 GS		6600 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 6840 (104%)

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 (in units of megabytes per second) that can be moved past the external memory interface in one second. It is calculated by multiplying the bus width by its memory speed. If it uses DDR type RAM, it must be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The higher the bandwidth is, the faster 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 amount of texture map elements (texels) that can be processed per second. This is calculated by multiplying the total amount of texture units of the card by the core speed of the chip. The higher the texel rate, the better the video card will be at texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels applied in a second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum amount of pixels that the graphics card could possibly write to its local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is calculated by multiplying the number of Raster Operations Pipelines 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 of the card - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the ability to get to the maximum fill rate.