GeForce 8800 Ultra vs Radeon HD 4790

Intro

Compare all of that to the Radeon HD 4790, which features clock speeds of 600 MHz on the GPU, and 800 MHz on the 512 MB of GDDR5 RAM. It features 640(128x5) SPUs along with 32 TAUs and 16 ROPs.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically speaking, the GeForce 8800 Ultra should perform a little bit faster than the Radeon HD 4790 overall. (explain)

GeForce 8800 Ultra		103680 MB/sec
Radeon HD 4790		102400 MB/sec
	Difference: 1280 (1%)

Texel Rate

The GeForce 8800 Ultra should be a lot (more or less 104%) more effective at AF than the Radeon HD 4790. (explain)

GeForce 8800 Ultra		39168 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 4790		19200 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 19968 (104%)

Pixel Rate

The GeForce 8800 Ultra is much (about 53%) more effective at FSAA than the Radeon HD 4790, and also capable of handling higher resolutions without slowing down too much. (explain)

GeForce 8800 Ultra		14688 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 4790		9600 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 5088 (53%)

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 (in units of megabytes per second) that can be transferred over the external memory interface within a second. It is calculated by multiplying the card's bus width by its memory clock speed. If the card has DDR type memory, it must be multiplied by 2 once again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher the bandwidth is, 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 applied in one second. This is calculated by multiplying the total texture units of the card by the core clock speed of the chip. The better the texel rate, the better the graphics card will be at texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels in a second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels that the graphics chip could possibly write to the local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is calculated by multiplying the number of ROPs by the the core clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - aka Render Output Units) are responsible for filling the screen with pixels (the image). The actual pixel fill rate is also dependant on many 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.