GeForce 8800 Ultra vs Radeon RX 460

Intro

Compare all that to the Radeon RX 460, which uses a 14 nm design. AMD has set the core speed at 1090 MHz. The GDDR5 RAM works at a speed of 1750 MHz on this specific card. It features 896 SPUs along with 56 TAUs and 16 Rasterization Operator Units.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon RX 460		75 Watts
GeForce 8800 Ultra		171 Watts
	Difference: 96 Watts (128%)

Memory Bandwidth

In theory, the Radeon RX 460 should be 8% faster than the GeForce 8800 Ultra overall, because of its greater bandwidth. (explain)

Radeon RX 460		112000 MB/sec
GeForce 8800 Ultra		103680 MB/sec
	Difference: 8320 (8%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon RX 460 is a lot (about 56%) more effective at AF than the GeForce 8800 Ultra. (explain)

Radeon RX 460		61040 Mtexels/sec
GeForce 8800 Ultra		39168 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 21872 (56%)

Pixel Rate

If running with high levels of AA is important to you, then the Radeon RX 460 is the winner, though only just barely. (explain)

Radeon RX 460		17440 Mpixels/sec
GeForce 8800 Ultra		14688 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 2752 (19%)

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 (measured in megabytes per second) that can be moved across the external memory interface in one second. The number is worked out by multiplying the card's bus width by its memory speed. If it uses DDR type memory, it must 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, High Dynamic Range and high resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum amount of texture map elements (texels) that can be applied per second. This number is calculated by multiplying the total amount of texture units of the card by the core 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 in a second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels that the graphics chip could possibly write to its local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is worked out by multiplying the number of colour ROPs by the the core speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - aka Render Output Units) are responsible for filling the screen with pixels (the image). The actual pixel rate also depends on quite a few other factors, especially the memory bandwidth - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the ability to reach the maximum fill rate.