GeForce GTX 260 Core 216 vs Radeon HD 4790

Intro

The GeForce GTX 260 Core 216 comes with a GPU clock speed of 576 MHz, and the 896 MB of GDDR3 RAM is set to run at 999 MHz through a 448-bit bus. It also is made up of 216 SPUs, 72 Texture Address Units, and 28 Raster Operation Units.

Compare that to the Radeon HD 4790, which has core speeds of 600 MHz on the GPU, and 800 MHz on the 512 MB of GDDR5 RAM. It features 640(128x5) SPUs as well as 32 TAUs and 16 Rasterization Operator Units.

Price Comparison

Please note that the price comparisons are based on search keywords, and might not be the exact same card listed on this page. We have no control over the accuracy of their search results.

GeForce GTX 260 Core 216 Amazon.com Other US-based stores Amazon.co.uk Amazon.de Amazon.fr

Radeon HD 4790 Amazon.com Other US-based stores Amazon.co.uk Amazon.de Amazon.fr

Specifications

Model	GeForce GTX 260 Core 216	Radeon HD 4790
Manufacturer	nVidia	ATi
Year	September 16, 2008	2009
Code Name	G200	RV790
Fab Process	65 nm	55 nm
Bus	PCIe x16 2.0	PCIe 2.0 x16
Memory	896 MB	512 MB
Core Speed	576 MHz	600 MHz
Shader Speed	1242 MHz	(N/A) MHz
Memory Speed	999 MHz	800 MHz
Unified Shaders	216	640(128x5)
Texture Mapping Units	72	32
Render Output Units	28	16
Bus Type	GDDR3	GDDR5
Bus Width	448-bit	256-bit
DirectX Version	DirectX 10	DirectX 10.1
OpenGL Version	OpenGL 3.1	OpenGL 3.0
Power (Max TDP)	202 watts	(N/A) watts
Shader Model	4.0	4.1
Bandwidth	111888 MB/sec	102400 MB/sec
Texel Rate	41472 Mtexels/sec	19200 Mtexels/sec
Pixel Rate	16128 Mpixels/sec	9600 Mpixels/sec

Memory Bandwidth: Bandwidth is the maximum amount of data (measured in MB per second) that can be transported over the external memory interface within a second. It is calculated by multiplying the card's interface width by the speed of its memory. If the card has DDR type memory, the result should be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The higher the bandwidth is, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, HDR and high resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum number of texture map elements (texels) that can be processed in one 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 per second.

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