GeForce GTX 460 SE vs Radeon HD 4730

Intro

Compare that to the Radeon HD 4730, which comes with clock speeds of 700 MHz on the GPU, and 900 MHz on the 512 MB of GDDR5 memory. It features 640(128x5) SPUs as well as 32 Texture Address Units and 8 Rasterization Operator Units.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon HD 4730		140 Watts
GeForce GTX 460 SE		150 Watts
	Difference: 10 Watts (7%)

Memory Bandwidth

In theory, the GeForce GTX 460 SE should be much faster than the Radeon HD 4730 in general. (explain)

GeForce GTX 460 SE		108800 MB/sec
Radeon HD 4730		57600 MB/sec
	Difference: 51200 (89%)

Texel Rate

The GeForce GTX 460 SE should be a lot (more or less 39%) more effective at texture filtering than the Radeon HD 4730. (explain)

GeForce GTX 460 SE		31200 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 4730		22400 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 8800 (39%)

Pixel Rate

If using high levels of AA 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 4730		5600 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 15200 (271%)

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 maximum amount of information (counted in MB per second) that can be moved past the external memory interface in one second. It is worked out by multiplying the card's interface width by its memory clock speed. If it uses DDR type RAM, the result should be multiplied by 2 again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The better the bandwidth is, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, High Dynamic Range and higher screen resolutions.

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

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels the graphics card could possibly write to the local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is worked out by multiplying the number of Render Output Units by the the core speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - sometimes also referred to as Render Output Units) are responsible for drawing the pixels (image) on the screen. The actual pixel output rate also depends on many other factors, especially the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the ability to get to the max fill rate.