GeForce GTX 460 SE vs Radeon HD 7790

Intro

Compare all that to the Radeon HD 7790, which uses a 28 nm design. AMD has clocked the core frequency at 1000 MHz. The GDDR5 memory is set to run at a speed of 1500 MHz on this card. It features 896 SPUs as well as 56 Texture Address Units and 16 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon HD 7790		85 Watts
GeForce GTX 460 SE		150 Watts
	Difference: 65 Watts (76%)

Memory Bandwidth

Performance-wise, the GeForce GTX 460 SE should in theory be just a bit better than the Radeon HD 7790 overall. (explain)

GeForce GTX 460 SE		108800 MB/sec
Radeon HD 7790		96000 MB/sec
	Difference: 12800 (13%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 7790 will be much (about 79%) faster with regards to anisotropic filtering than the GeForce GTX 460 SE. (explain)

Radeon HD 7790		56000 Mtexels/sec
GeForce GTX 460 SE		31200 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 24800 (79%)

Pixel Rate

The GeForce GTX 460 SE will be much (approximately 30%) faster with regards to anti-aliasing than the Radeon HD 7790, and also will be capable of handling higher screen resolutions more effectively. (explain)

GeForce GTX 460 SE		20800 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 7790		16000 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 4800 (30%)

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 maximum amount of data (counted in megabytes per second) that can be transported over the external memory interface in one second. The number is calculated by multiplying the interface width by the speed of its memory. If the card has DDR memory, the result should be multiplied by 2 once again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher the card's memory bandwidth, 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 texture map elements (texels) that can be applied per second. This figure 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 graphics card will be at handling texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels processed in one second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum number of pixels that the graphics chip can possibly write to the local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is calculated by multiplying the number of Render Output Units by the the core clock speed. 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 quite a few other factors, especially the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the potential to reach the max fill rate.