GeForce 940M vs Radeon HD 4790

Intro

Compare those specifications to the Radeon HD 4790, which has a GPU core clock speed of 600 MHz, and 512 MB of GDDR5 RAM set to run at 800 MHz through a 256-bit bus. It also features 640(128x5) Stream Processors, 32 Texture Address Units, and 16 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Memory Bandwidth

Performance-wise, the Radeon HD 4790 should theoretically be much better than the GeForce 940M in general. (explain)

Radeon HD 4790		102400 MB/sec
GeForce 940M		16000 MB/sec
	Difference: 86400 (540%)

Texel Rate

The GeForce 940M will be a lot (approximately 34%) more effective at texture filtering than the Radeon HD 4790. (explain)

GeForce 940M		25728 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 4790		19200 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 6528 (34%)

Pixel Rate

If running with high levels of AA is important to you, then the Radeon HD 4790 is superior to the GeForce 940M, but it probably won't make a huge difference. (explain)

Radeon HD 4790		9600 Mpixels/sec
GeForce 940M		8576 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 1024 (12%)

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 (counted in megabytes per second) that can be transported across the external memory interface in a second. The number is worked out by multiplying the interface width by the speed of its memory. If it uses DDR RAM, it should be multiplied by 2 again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The better the memory bandwidth, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, 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 amount of texture units of the card by the core clock speed of the chip. The higher this number, the better the video 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 number of pixels the graphics card can possibly record to the local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is calculated by multiplying the number of colour ROPs by the the core speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also called Render Output Units) are responsible for filling the screen with pixels (the image). The actual pixel output rate also depends on lots of other factors, especially the memory bandwidth - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the ability to get to the maximum fill rate.