GeForce GTX 460 SE vs Radeon HD 4850 X2 512MB

Intro

The GeForce GTX 460 SE makes use of a 40 nm design. nVidia has set the core frequency at 650 MHz. The GDDR5 RAM works at a speed of 850 MHz on this specific card. It features 288 SPUs along with 48 Texture Address Units and 32 Rasterization Operator Units.

Compare all of that to the Radeon HD 4850 X2 512MB, which comes with a GPU core clock speed of 625 MHz, and 512 MB of GDDR3 RAM running at 993 MHz through a 256-bit bus. It also features 800(160x5) Stream Processors, 40 Texture Address Units, and 16 ROPs.

Price Comparison

Please note that the price comparisons are based on search keywords, and might not be the exact same card listed on this page. We have no control over the accuracy of their search results.

GeForce GTX 460 SE Amazon.com Other US-based stores Amazon.co.uk Amazon.de Amazon.fr

Radeon HD 4850 X2 512MB Amazon.com Other US-based stores Amazon.co.uk Amazon.de Amazon.fr

Specifications

Model	GeForce GTX 460 SE	Radeon HD 4850 X2 512MB
Manufacturer	nVidia	ATi
Year	November 2010	Nov 7, 2008
Code Name	GF104	R700
Fab Process	40 nm	55 nm
Bus	PCIe x16	PCIe 2.0 x16 (PCIe bridge)
Memory	1024 MB	512 MB (x2)
Core Speed	650 MHz	625 MHz (x2)
Shader Speed	1300 MHz	(N/A) MHz (x2)
Memory Speed	850 MHz	993 MHz (x2)
Unified Shaders	288	800(160x5) (x2)
Texture Mapping Units	48	40 (x2)
Render Output Units	32	16 (x2)
Bus Type	GDDR5	GDDR3
Bus Width	256-bit	256-bit (x2)
DirectX Version	DirectX 11	DirectX 10.1
OpenGL Version	OpenGL 4.1	OpenGL 3.0
Power (Max TDP)	150 watts	250 watts
Shader Model	5.0	4.1
Bandwidth	108800 MB/sec	127104 MB/sec
Texel Rate	31200 Mtexels/sec	50000 Mtexels/sec
Pixel Rate	20800 Mpixels/sec	20000 Mpixels/sec

Memory Bandwidth: Memory bandwidth is the maximum amount of data (measured in MB per second) that can be moved past the external memory interface in one second. It's worked out by multiplying the card's interface width by the speed of its memory. In the case of DDR memory, the result should be multiplied by 2 once again. If DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The higher the bandwidth is, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, HDR and high resolutions.

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

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels that the graphics chip can possibly record to its local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is calculated by multiplying the amount of Raster Operations Pipelines by the the card's clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - sometimes also referred to as Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel rate also depends on many other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the ability to get to the maximum fill rate.