GeForce GTX 280 vs Radeon HD 7790

Intro

Compare all that to the Radeon HD 7790, which has a clock speed of 1000 MHz and a GDDR5 memory speed of 1500 MHz. It also features a 128-bit bus, and makes use of a 28 nm design. It features 896 SPUs, 56 TAUs, and 16 Raster Operation Units.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon HD 7790		85 Watts
GeForce GTX 280		236 Watts
	Difference: 151 Watts (178%)

Memory Bandwidth

In theory, the GeForce GTX 280 will be 48% faster than the Radeon HD 7790 overall, due to its greater bandwidth. (explain)

GeForce GTX 280		141696 MB/sec
Radeon HD 7790		96000 MB/sec
	Difference: 45696 (48%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 7790 should be just a bit (more or less 16%) faster with regards to anisotropic filtering than the GeForce GTX 280. (explain)

Radeon HD 7790		56000 Mtexels/sec
GeForce GTX 280		48160 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 7840 (16%)

Pixel Rate

The GeForce GTX 280 will be a bit (more or less 20%) more effective at anti-aliasing than the Radeon HD 7790, and will be capable of handling higher resolutions more effectively. (explain)

GeForce GTX 280		19264 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 7790		16000 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 3264 (20%)

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 data (in units of megabytes per second) that can be transferred past the external memory interface in a second. It's calculated by multiplying the card's bus width by its memory clock speed. In the case of DDR memory, the result should be multiplied by 2 once again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher the card's memory bandwidth, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, HDR and high resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum texture map elements (texels) that can be processed per second. This 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 card will be at texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels processed in a second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum number of pixels the graphics card could possibly record to the local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is calculated by multiplying the amount of ROPs 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 fill rate is also dependant on lots of other factors, especially the memory bandwidth - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the potential to reach the maximum fill rate.