GeForce GTX 460 SE 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 TAUs and 16 Rasterization Operator Units.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce GTX 460 SE		150 Watts
Radeon HD 4890 1GB		190 Watts
	Difference: 40 Watts (27%)

Memory Bandwidth

The Radeon HD 4890 1GB should in theory be a bit faster than the GeForce GTX 460 SE overall. (explain)

Radeon HD 4890 1GB		124800 MB/sec
GeForce GTX 460 SE		108800 MB/sec
	Difference: 16000 (15%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 4890 1GB should be much (more or less 28%) more effective at anisotropic filtering than the GeForce GTX 460 SE. (explain)

Radeon HD 4890 1GB		40000 Mtexels/sec
GeForce GTX 460 SE		31200 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 8800 (28%)

Pixel Rate

If running with lots of anti-aliasing is important to you, then the GeForce GTX 460 SE is superior to the Radeon HD 4890 1GB, by far. (explain)

GeForce GTX 460 SE		20800 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 4890 1GB		16000 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 4800 (30%)

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 maximum amount of data (measured in MB per second) that can be moved over the external memory interface within a second. It is calculated by multiplying the card's interface width by the speed of its memory. If it uses DDR memory, it must be multiplied by 2 once again. If DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The better the memory bandwidth, 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 texture map elements (texels) that can be processed in one second. This number is worked out by multiplying the total number of texture units by the core clock speed of the chip. The better the texel rate, the better the video card will be at texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels processed in a second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels that the graphics chip could possibly write to the local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is worked out by multiplying the number of Raster Operations Pipelines by the the card's clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also sometimes called Render Output Units) are responsible for drawing the pixels (image) on the screen. The actual pixel fill rate is also dependant on many other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the ability to get to the maximum fill rate.