GeForce GTX 460 2GB vs Radeon HD 7770

Intro

The GeForce GTX 460 2GB uses a 40 nm design. nVidia has clocked the core frequency at 675 MHz. The GDDR5 memory is set to run at a speed of 900 MHz on this particular card. It features 336 SPUs as well as 56 Texture Address Units and 32 Rasterization Operator Units.

Compare those specs to the Radeon HD 7770, which features GPU clock speed of 1000 MHz, and 1024 MB of GDDR5 RAM running at 1125 MHz through a 128-bit bus. It also is made up of 640 SPUs, 40 Texture Address Units, and 16 Raster Operation Units.

Price Comparison

Specifications

Memory Bandwidth: Bandwidth is the maximum amount of information (counted in MB per second) that can be transferred across the external memory interface in a second. The number is worked out by multiplying the card's interface width by the speed of its memory. If it uses DDR type memory, it should be multiplied by 2 once again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The better the bandwidth is, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, HDR and high resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum number of texture map elements (texels) that can be processed per second. This number is calculated by multiplying the total number of texture units of the card by the core speed of the chip. The higher this number, the better the graphics 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 the graphics card could possibly record to the local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is calculated by multiplying the amount of colour ROPs by the the core speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also sometimes called Render Output Units) are responsible for filling the screen with pixels (the image). The actual pixel rate also depends on quite a few other factors, especially the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the potential to reach the maximum fill rate.