GeForce GTX 295 vs Radeon HD 4890 1GB

Intro

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

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon HD 4890 1GB		190 Watts
GeForce GTX 295		289 Watts
	Difference: 99 Watts (52%)

Memory Bandwidth

Performance-wise, the GeForce GTX 295 should theoretically be much superior to the Radeon HD 4890 1GB in general. (explain)

GeForce GTX 295		223776 MB/sec
Radeon HD 4890 1GB		124800 MB/sec
	Difference: 98976 (79%)

Texel Rate

The GeForce GTX 295 will be much (approximately 130%) more effective at anisotropic filtering than the Radeon HD 4890 1GB. (explain)

GeForce GTX 295		92160 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 4890 1GB		40000 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 52160 (130%)

Pixel Rate

The GeForce GTX 295 will be quite a bit (about 102%) more effective at full screen anti-aliasing than the Radeon HD 4890 1GB, and should be able to handle higher resolutions without losing too much performance. (explain)

GeForce GTX 295		32256 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 4890 1GB		16000 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 16256 (102%)

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.

One or more cards in this comparison are multi-core. This means that their bandwidth, texel and pixel rates are theoretically doubled - this does not mean the card will actually perform twice as fast, but only that it should in theory be able to. Actual game benchmarks will give a more accurate idea of what it's capable of.

Price Comparison

Specifications

Memory Bandwidth: Memory bandwidth is the maximum amount of data (in units of MB per second) that can be transported past the external memory interface within a second. It is worked out by multiplying the card's bus width by its memory speed. If it uses DDR RAM, it should be multiplied by 2 once again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher the card's memory bandwidth, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, HDR and high resolutions.

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

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum number of pixels the video card could possibly record to the local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is worked out by multiplying the number of Raster Operations Pipelines by the clock speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - sometimes also referred to as Render Output Units) are responsible for drawing the pixels (image) on the screen. The actual pixel fill rate also depends on quite a few other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to get to the maximum fill rate.