Radeon HD 4790 vs Radeon R7 260X

Intro

Compare all that to the Radeon R7 260X, which has a clock speed of 1100 MHz and a GDDR5 memory frequency of 1625 MHz. It also features 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

Memory Bandwidth

In theory, the Radeon R7 260X should be 2% faster than the Radeon HD 4790 in general, because of its higher data rate. (explain)

Radeon R7 260X		104000 MB/sec
Radeon HD 4790		102400 MB/sec
	Difference: 1600 (2%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon R7 260X will be quite a bit (approximately 221%) more effective at anisotropic filtering than the Radeon HD 4790. (explain)

Radeon R7 260X		61600 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 4790		19200 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 42400 (221%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon R7 260X is much (more or less 83%) faster with regards to FSAA than the Radeon HD 4790, and also able to handle higher resolutions without slowing down too much. (explain)

Radeon R7 260X		17600 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 4790		9600 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 8000 (83%)

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 max amount of information (measured in MB per second) that can be transferred past the external memory interface in a second. The number is calculated by multiplying the card's interface width by its memory speed. If it uses DDR type RAM, it must be multiplied by 2 once again. If DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The higher the card's memory bandwidth, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, High Dynamic Range and high resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum number of texture map elements (texels) that can be applied per second. This number is worked out by multiplying the total texture units of the card by the core clock speed of the chip. The better the texel rate, the better the 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 number of pixels that the graphics card can possibly write to the local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is worked out by multiplying the amount of colour ROPs by the the core speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - sometimes also referred to as Render Output Units) are responsible for drawing the pixels (image) on the screen. The actual pixel rate also depends on quite a few 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.