GeForce GTX 460 1GB vs Radeon HD 7990

Intro

Compare all that to the Radeon HD 7990, which uses a 28 nm design. AMD has set the core frequency at 950 MHz. The GDDR5 RAM is set to run at a frequency of 1500 MHz on this specific card. It features 2048 SPUs along with 128 Texture Address Units and 32 ROPs.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce GTX 460 1GB		160 Watts
Radeon HD 7990		375 Watts
	Difference: 215 Watts (134%)

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically, the Radeon HD 7990 should perform a lot faster than the GeForce GTX 460 1GB overall. (explain)

Radeon HD 7990		576000 MB/sec
GeForce GTX 460 1GB		115200 MB/sec
	Difference: 460800 (400%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 7990 should be quite a bit (more or less 543%) faster with regards to texture filtering than the GeForce GTX 460 1GB. (explain)

Radeon HD 7990		243200 Mtexels/sec
GeForce GTX 460 1GB		37800 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 205400 (543%)

Pixel Rate

If using high levels of AA is important to you, then the Radeon HD 7990 is a better choice, and very much so. (explain)

Radeon HD 7990		60800 Mpixels/sec
GeForce GTX 460 1GB		21600 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 39200 (181%)

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.

One or more cards in this comparison are multi-core. This means that their bandwidth, texel and pixel rates are theoretically doubled - this does not mean the card will actually perform twice as fast, but only that it should in theory be able to. Actual game benchmarks will give a more accurate idea of what it's capable of.

Price Comparison

Specifications

Memory Bandwidth: Bandwidth is the maximum amount of information (counted in MB per second) that can be moved over the external memory interface within a second. The number is 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 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The better the memory bandwidth, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, 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 number is worked out 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 video card will be at handling texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels processed in a second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum amount of pixels that the graphics card could possibly record to its local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is calculated by multiplying the amount of Render Output Units by the the core speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - aka Render Output Units) are responsible for drawing the pixels (image) on the screen. The actual pixel output rate is also dependant on lots of other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the potential to get to the maximum fill rate.