GeForce GT 440 1.5GB vs Radeon HD 4790

Intro

Compare all of that to the Radeon HD 4790, which comes with a GPU core clock speed of 600 MHz, and 512 MB of GDDR5 RAM set to run at 800 MHz through a 256-bit bus. It also features 640(128x5) Stream Processors, 32 TAUs, and 16 Raster Operation Units.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically speaking, the Radeon HD 4790 is 137% quicker than the GeForce GT 440 1.5GB overall, due to its greater data rate. (explain)

Radeon HD 4790		102400 MB/sec
GeForce GT 440 1.5GB		43200 MB/sec
	Difference: 59200 (137%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 4790 will be a lot (about 35%) more effective at anisotropic filtering than the GeForce GT 440 1.5GB. (explain)

Radeon HD 4790		19200 Mtexels/sec
GeForce GT 440 1.5GB		14256 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 4944 (35%)

Pixel Rate

The GeForce GT 440 1.5GB should be much (more or less 49%) more effective at full screen anti-aliasing than the Radeon HD 4790, and will be able to handle higher resolutions without slowing down too much. (explain)

GeForce GT 440 1.5GB		14256 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 4790		9600 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 4656 (49%)

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: Bandwidth is the max amount of information (measured in megabytes per second) that can be transferred across the external memory interface in one second. It's calculated by multiplying the card's bus width by its memory speed. If it uses DDR type memory, it should be multiplied by 2 once again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The better 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 number of texture map elements (texels) that are applied 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 this number, the better the video card will be at handling texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels per second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels that the graphics chip could 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 colour ROPs 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 fill rate also depends on lots of other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to get to the max fill rate.