GeForce GTX 460 SE vs Radeon HD 7990

Intro

Compare that to the Radeon HD 7990, which features a core clock speed of 950 MHz and a GDDR5 memory speed of 1500 MHz. It also features a 384-bit bus, and makes use of a 28 nm design. It is made up of 2048 SPUs, 128 Texture Address Units, and 32 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce GTX 460 SE		150 Watts
Radeon HD 7990		375 Watts
	Difference: 225 Watts (150%)

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically speaking, the Radeon HD 7990 will be 429% faster than the GeForce GTX 460 SE overall, because of its higher data rate. (explain)

Radeon HD 7990		576000 MB/sec
GeForce GTX 460 SE		108800 MB/sec
	Difference: 467200 (429%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 7990 will be a lot (more or less 679%) faster with regards to texture filtering than the GeForce GTX 460 SE. (explain)

Radeon HD 7990		243200 Mtexels/sec
GeForce GTX 460 SE		31200 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 212000 (679%)

Pixel Rate

If using a high resolution is important to you, then the Radeon HD 7990 is the winner, and very much so. (explain)

Radeon HD 7990		60800 Mpixels/sec
GeForce GTX 460 SE		20800 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 40000 (192%)

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 largest amount of data (in units of MB per second) that can be moved past the external memory interface within a second. It is calculated by multiplying the interface width by the speed of its memory. In the case of DDR RAM, it must be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The better the bandwidth is, 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 number of texture map elements (texels) that are processed in one second. This figure is calculated by multiplying the total number of texture units by the core speed of the chip. The higher the texel rate, the better the video card will be at texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels processed in one second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum amount of pixels that the graphics card can possibly record to the local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is worked out by multiplying the number of ROPs by the clock speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also sometimes called Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel rate also depends on quite a few other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the potential to reach the maximum fill rate.