GeForce GTX 860M vs Radeon HD 4790

Intro

Compare all of that to the Radeon HD 4790, which uses a 55 nm design. AMD has clocked the core speed at 600 MHz. The GDDR5 memory runs at a speed of 800 MHz on this card. It features 640(128x5) SPUs as well as 32 Texture Address Units and 16 Rasterization Operator Units.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Memory Bandwidth

In theory, the Radeon HD 4790 should perform quite a bit faster than the GeForce GTX 860M overall. (explain)

Radeon HD 4790		102400 MB/sec
GeForce GTX 860M		64000 MB/sec
	Difference: 38400 (60%)

Texel Rate

The GeForce GTX 860M should be much (about 299%) faster with regards to texture filtering than the Radeon HD 4790. (explain)

GeForce GTX 860M		76512 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 4790		19200 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 57312 (299%)

Pixel Rate

If running with a high resolution is important to you, then the GeForce GTX 860M is the winner, by a large margin. (explain)

GeForce GTX 860M		12752 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 4790		9600 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 3152 (33%)

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: Memory bandwidth is the max amount of information (counted in megabytes per second) that can be transferred past the external memory interface in a second. The number is calculated by multiplying the card's interface width by its memory speed. If the card has DDR type memory, the result should be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The better the card's memory bandwidth, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, HDR and high resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum texture map elements (texels) that can be processed in one second. This figure is worked out by multiplying the total amount of texture units by the core speed of the chip. The better this number, the better the card will be at texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels processed in a second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum number of pixels that the graphics chip can possibly write to the local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is worked out by multiplying the amount of ROPs by the the core speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - aka Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel 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.