GeForce GTX 970 vs Radeon HD 4890 1GB

Intro

Compare all of that to the Radeon HD 4890 1GB, which uses a 55 nm design. AMD has clocked the core speed at 1000 MHz. The GDDR5 RAM is set to run at a frequency of 975 MHz on this card. It features 800(160x5) SPUs as well as 40 Texture Address Units and 16 Rasterization Operator Units.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce GTX 970		145 Watts
Radeon HD 4890 1GB		190 Watts
	Difference: 45 Watts (31%)

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically speaking, the GeForce GTX 970 should perform a lot faster than the Radeon HD 4890 1GB overall. (explain)

GeForce GTX 970		224000 MB/sec
Radeon HD 4890 1GB		124800 MB/sec
	Difference: 99200 (79%)

Texel Rate

The GeForce GTX 970 is much (about 173%) better at AF than the Radeon HD 4890 1GB. (explain)

GeForce GTX 970		109200 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 4890 1GB		40000 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 69200 (173%)

Pixel Rate

If using a high screen resolution is important to you, then the GeForce GTX 970 is the winner, by far. (explain)

GeForce GTX 970		67200 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 4890 1GB		16000 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 51200 (320%)

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 largest amount of data (counted in megabytes per second) that can be transported over the external memory interface in a second. It is calculated by multiplying the bus width by the speed of its memory. If the card has DDR RAM, the result should be multiplied by 2 once again. If 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 are processed per second. This figure is calculated by multiplying the total number of texture units by the core clock speed of the chip. The better this number, the better the video card will be at handling texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels per second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum amount of pixels that the graphics chip can possibly write to its local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is worked out by multiplying the number of colour ROPs by the the core clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also called Render Output Units) are responsible for drawing the pixels (image) on the screen. The actual pixel output rate also depends on lots of other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the ability to get to the max fill rate.