GeForce GTX 960 vs Radeon HD 4890 1GB

Intro

Compare those specs to the Radeon HD 4890 1GB, which features core speeds of 1000 MHz on the GPU, and 975 MHz on the 1024 MB of GDDR5 RAM. It features 800(160x5) SPUs along with 40 TAUs and 16 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce GTX 960		120 Watts
Radeon HD 4890 1GB		190 Watts
	Difference: 70 Watts (58%)

Memory Bandwidth

The Radeon HD 4890 1GB, in theory, should be just a bit faster than the GeForce GTX 960 in general. (explain)

Radeon HD 4890 1GB		124800 MB/sec
GeForce GTX 960		112000 MB/sec
	Difference: 12800 (11%)

Texel Rate

The GeForce GTX 960 is quite a bit (approximately 80%) better at anisotropic filtering than the Radeon HD 4890 1GB. (explain)

GeForce GTX 960		72128 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 4890 1GB		40000 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 32128 (80%)

Pixel Rate

The GeForce GTX 960 will be much (approximately 125%) better at full screen anti-aliasing than the Radeon HD 4890 1GB, and will be able to handle higher screen resolutions more effectively. (explain)

GeForce GTX 960		36064 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 4890 1GB		16000 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 20064 (125%)

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 maximum amount of information (in units of MB per second) that can be moved across the external memory interface within a second. It is worked out by multiplying the interface width by its memory clock speed. If it uses DDR memory, it must be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The better the 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 can be applied in one second. This figure is worked out by multiplying the total amount of texture units by the core clock speed of the chip. The better this number, the better the graphics 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 number of pixels the video card can possibly record to the local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is calculated by multiplying the amount of Raster Operations Pipelines by the clock speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also called Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel rate is also dependant on lots of other factors, especially the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to reach the maximum fill rate.