GeForce GTX 295 vs Radeon HD 4890 1GB

Intro

Compare those specs to the Radeon HD 4890 1GB, which comes with a clock speed of 1000 MHz and a GDDR5 memory speed of 975 MHz. It also makes use of a 256-bit bus, and uses a 55 nm design. It is comprised of 800(160x5) SPUs, 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

Theoretically, the GeForce GTX 295 should be quite a bit faster than the Radeon HD 4890 1GB overall. (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 quite a bit (about 130%) faster with regards to 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

If running with high levels of AA is important to you, then the GeForce GTX 295 is superior to the Radeon HD 4890 1GB, by a large margin. (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: Bandwidth is the maximum amount of data (in units of MB per second) that can be transported across the external memory interface in a second. It's calculated by multiplying the bus width by the speed of its memory. If the card has DDR memory, the result should be multiplied by 2 once again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The better the bandwidth is, 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 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 clock speed of the chip. The better the texel rate, the better the card will be at texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels applied per second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum amount of pixels that the graphics card can possibly write to its local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is calculated by multiplying the number of Raster Operations Pipelines 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 output rate also depends on quite a few other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the potential to get to the max fill rate.