GeForce GTX 460 SE vs Radeon HD 4770

Intro

Compare those specs to the Radeon HD 4770, which features a GPU core clock speed of 750 MHz, and 512 MB of GDDR5 RAM running at 800 MHz through a 128-bit bus. It also is comprised of 640(128x5) Stream Processors, 32 Texture Address Units, and 16 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon HD 4770		80 Watts
GeForce GTX 460 SE		150 Watts
	Difference: 70 Watts (88%)

Memory Bandwidth

In theory, the GeForce GTX 460 SE is 113% faster than the Radeon HD 4770 in general, due to its higher data rate. (explain)

GeForce GTX 460 SE		108800 MB/sec
Radeon HD 4770		51200 MB/sec
	Difference: 57600 (113%)

Texel Rate

The GeForce GTX 460 SE is a lot (approximately 30%) more effective at anisotropic filtering than the Radeon HD 4770. (explain)

GeForce GTX 460 SE		31200 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 4770		24000 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 7200 (30%)

Pixel Rate

If running with lots of anti-aliasing is important to you, then the GeForce GTX 460 SE is the winner, and very much so. (explain)

GeForce GTX 460 SE		20800 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 4770		12000 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 8800 (73%)

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 max amount of data (in units of MB per second) that can be moved over the external memory interface within a second. It is calculated by multiplying the bus width by its memory speed. If the card has DDR type memory, it must be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The better the card's memory bandwidth, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, High Dynamic Range and high resolutions.

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

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum amount of pixels that the graphics card can possibly write to the local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is calculated by multiplying the amount of ROPs by the the core speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - aka Render Output Units) are responsible for drawing the pixels (image) on the screen. The actual pixel fill rate is also dependant on lots of other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the ability to get to the max fill rate.