Radeon HD 4790 vs Radeon HD 7950

Intro

Compare that to the Radeon HD 7950, which comes with GPU clock speed of 800 MHz, and 1536 MB of GDDR5 RAM set to run at 1250 MHz through a 384-bit bus. It also is comprised of 1792 SPUs, 112 TAUs, and 32 Raster Operation Units.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Memory Bandwidth

In theory, the Radeon HD 7950 should perform quite a bit faster than the Radeon HD 4790 in general. (explain)

Radeon HD 7950		240000 MB/sec
Radeon HD 4790		102400 MB/sec
	Difference: 137600 (134%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 7950 should be much (about 367%) faster with regards to AF than the Radeon HD 4790. (explain)

Radeon HD 7950		89600 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 4790		19200 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 70400 (367%)

Pixel Rate

If running with high levels of AA is important to you, then the Radeon HD 7950 is superior to the Radeon HD 4790, and very much so. (explain)

Radeon HD 7950		25600 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 4790		9600 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 16000 (167%)

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 max amount of data (in units of MB per second) that can be transported past the external memory interface in a second. It is calculated by multiplying the card's interface width by the speed of its memory. If it uses DDR type RAM, it should be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher the bandwidth is, the better 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 amount of texture map elements (texels) that are applied in one second. This is calculated by multiplying the total texture units by the core speed of the chip. The higher this number, the better the card will be at handling 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 the local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is worked out by multiplying the number of colour ROPs by the the card's clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also called Render Output Units) are responsible for filling the screen with pixels (the image). The actual pixel output rate is also dependant on quite a few other factors, especially the memory bandwidth - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to get to the maximum fill rate.