GeForce GTX 295 vs Radeon HD 4890 2GB

Intro

Compare all that to the Radeon HD 4890 2GB, which uses a 55 nm design. AMD has clocked the core frequency at 1000 MHz. The GDDR5 memory is set to run at a speed of 975 MHz on this card. It features 800(160x5) SPUs along with 40 Texture Address Units and 16 Rasterization Operator Units.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon HD 4890 2GB		190 Watts
GeForce GTX 295		289 Watts
	Difference: 99 Watts (52%)

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically, the GeForce GTX 295 should be a lot faster than the Radeon HD 4890 2GB overall. (explain)

GeForce GTX 295		223776 MB/sec
Radeon HD 4890 2GB		124800 MB/sec
	Difference: 98976 (79%)

Texel Rate

The GeForce GTX 295 is quite a bit (about 130%) better at anisotropic filtering than the Radeon HD 4890 2GB. (explain)

GeForce GTX 295		92160 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 4890 2GB		40000 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 52160 (130%)

Pixel Rate

The GeForce GTX 295 will be much (approximately 102%) better at FSAA than the Radeon HD 4890 2GB, and also should be capable of handling higher screen resolutions better. (explain)

GeForce GTX 295		32256 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 4890 2GB		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 largest amount of information (in units of megabytes per second) that can be transferred past the external memory interface in one second. It is worked out by multiplying the bus width by the speed of its memory. If it uses DDR RAM, the result should be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher the bandwidth is, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, HDR and higher screen resolutions.

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

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum number of pixels the graphics card can possibly write to its local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is calculated by multiplying the number of colour ROPs by the the core clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - aka Render Output Units) are responsible for drawing the pixels (image) on the screen. The actual pixel output rate also depends on many other factors, especially the memory bandwidth - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to get to the max fill rate.