GeForce GT 440 1.5GB vs Radeon HD 4890 1GB

Intro

Compare those specs to the Radeon HD 4890 1GB, which comes with clock speeds of 1000 MHz on the GPU, and 975 MHz on the 1024 MB of GDDR5 memory. 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)

GeForce GT 440 1.5GB		56 Watts
Radeon HD 4890 1GB		190 Watts
	Difference: 134 Watts (239%)

Memory Bandwidth

The Radeon HD 4890 1GB should theoretically perform much faster than the GeForce GT 440 1.5GB overall. (explain)

Radeon HD 4890 1GB		124800 MB/sec
GeForce GT 440 1.5GB		43200 MB/sec
	Difference: 81600 (189%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 4890 1GB will be much (about 181%) faster with regards to anisotropic filtering than the GeForce GT 440 1.5GB. (explain)

Radeon HD 4890 1GB		40000 Mtexels/sec
GeForce GT 440 1.5GB		14256 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 25744 (181%)

Pixel Rate

If using high levels of AA is important to you, then the Radeon HD 4890 1GB is a better choice, not by a very large margin though. (explain)

Radeon HD 4890 1GB		16000 Mpixels/sec
GeForce GT 440 1.5GB		14256 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 1744 (12%)

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 largest amount of information (in units of megabytes per second) that can be moved past the external memory interface within a second. It is calculated by multiplying the interface width by the speed of its memory. If it uses DDR memory, the result should be multiplied by 2 again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher the memory bandwidth, the better 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 in one second. This number is worked out by multiplying the total amount of texture units by the core clock 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 applied in a second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum number of pixels the video card can 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 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 rate is also dependant on many other factors, especially the memory bandwidth - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the potential to get to the max fill rate.