GeForce GTS 450 1GB vs Radeon HD 7790

Intro

Compare those specifications to the Radeon HD 7790, which comes with a clock speed of 1000 MHz and a GDDR5 memory frequency of 1500 MHz. It also uses a 128-bit memory bus, and uses a 28 nm design. It is made up of 896 SPUs, 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 GTS 450 1GB		106 Watts
	Difference: 21 Watts (25%)

Memory Bandwidth

The Radeon HD 7790 should theoretically be a lot faster than the GeForce GTS 450 1GB overall. (explain)

Radeon HD 7790		96000 MB/sec
GeForce GTS 450 1GB		57728 MB/sec
	Difference: 38272 (66%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 7790 will be quite a bit (about 123%) better at anisotropic filtering than the GeForce GTS 450 1GB. (explain)

Radeon HD 7790		56000 Mtexels/sec
GeForce GTS 450 1GB		25056 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 30944 (123%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon HD 7790 is quite a bit (more or less 28%) more effective at full screen anti-aliasing than the GeForce GTS 450 1GB, and will be able to handle higher screen resolutions without losing too much performance. (explain)

Radeon HD 7790		16000 Mpixels/sec
GeForce GTS 450 1GB		12528 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 3472 (28%)

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 largest amount of information (in units of megabytes per second) that can be moved past the external memory interface within a second. It is calculated by multiplying the interface width by its memory speed. If the card has DDR type RAM, the result should be multiplied by 2 once again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The better the memory bandwidth, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, HDR and high resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum texture map elements (texels) that can be applied in one second. This number is calculated by multiplying the total amount of texture units of the card by the core speed of the chip. The better the texel rate, the better the video 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 most pixels the video card can possibly write to the local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is worked out by multiplying the number of Render Output Units by the the card's clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also called Render Output Units) are responsible for drawing the pixels (image) on the screen. The actual pixel rate also depends on many other factors, especially the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to get to the max fill rate.