GeForce GTX 260 vs Radeon HD 4790

Intro

The GeForce GTX 260 uses a 65 nm design. nVidia has set the core speed at 576 MHz. The GDDR3 memory is set to run at a speed of 999 MHz on this specific model. It features 192 SPUs along with 64 Texture Address Units and 28 ROPs.

Compare all that to the Radeon HD 4790, which uses a 55 nm design. ATi has set the core speed at 600 MHz. The GDDR5 memory runs at a frequency of 800 MHz on this particular card. It features 640(128x5) SPUs along with 32 Texture Address Units 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 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	Radeon HD 4790
Manufacturer	nVidia	ATi
Year	June 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	192	640(128x5)
Texture Mapping Units	64	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)	182 watts	(N/A) watts
Shader Model	4.0	4.1
Bandwidth	111888 MB/sec	102400 MB/sec
Texel Rate	36864 Mtexels/sec	19200 Mtexels/sec
Pixel Rate	16128 Mpixels/sec	9600 Mpixels/sec

Memory Bandwidth: Memory bandwidth is the largest amount of data (measured in megabytes per second) that can be moved across the external memory interface within a second. It is calculated by multiplying the card's interface width by its memory clock speed. If the card has DDR RAM, the result should be multiplied by 2 again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher the card's memory bandwidth, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, High Dynamic Range and high resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum amount of texture map elements (texels) that are processed in one second. This is calculated by multiplying the total number of texture units by the core clock speed of the chip. The higher the texel rate, the better the card will be at handling texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels applied in a second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels the video card could possibly write to the local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is calculated by multiplying the amount of ROPs by the the core clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - sometimes also referred to as Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel output rate is also dependant 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 maximum fill rate.