Geforce GTX 680 vs Radeon HD 4790

Intro

Compare those specifications to the Radeon HD 4790, which makes use of a 55 nm design. AMD has set the core frequency at 600 MHz. The GDDR5 memory works at a speed of 800 MHz on this specific card. It features 640(128x5) SPUs along with 32 TAUs and 16 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Memory Bandwidth

The Geforce GTX 680 should in theory be quite a bit faster than the Radeon HD 4790 overall. (explain)

Geforce GTX 680		192256 MB/sec
Radeon HD 4790		102400 MB/sec
	Difference: 89856 (88%)

Texel Rate

The Geforce GTX 680 will be a lot (about 571%) better at texture filtering than the Radeon HD 4790. (explain)

Geforce GTX 680		128768 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 4790		19200 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 109568 (571%)

Pixel Rate

If using lots of anti-aliasing is important to you, then the Geforce GTX 680 is the winner, and very much so. (explain)

Geforce GTX 680		32192 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 4790		9600 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 22592 (235%)

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 megabytes per second) that can be moved past the external memory interface in one second. The number is calculated by multiplying the card's bus width by its memory clock speed. In the case of DDR memory, it must be multiplied by 2 once again. If DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The better the card's memory bandwidth, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, HDR and high resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum amount of texture map elements (texels) that can be applied in one second. This is calculated by multiplying the total texture units of the card by the core clock speed of the chip. The higher the texel rate, 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 most pixels that the graphics chip can possibly write to the local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is worked out by multiplying the number of Render Output Units by the clock speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also called Render Output Units) are responsible for filling the screen with pixels (the image). 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 potential to get to the max fill rate.