GeForce GTX 460 (OEM) vs Radeon HD 4790

Intro

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

(No game benchmarks for this combination yet.)

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Memory Bandwidth

The GeForce GTX 460 (OEM) should in theory perform just a bit faster than the Radeon HD 4790 in general. (explain)

GeForce GTX 460 (OEM)		108800 MB/sec
Radeon HD 4790		102400 MB/sec
	Difference: 6400 (6%)

Texel Rate

The GeForce GTX 460 (OEM) will be much (about 90%) better at anisotropic filtering than the Radeon HD 4790. (explain)

GeForce GTX 460 (OEM)		36400 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 4790		19200 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 17200 (90%)

Pixel Rate

The GeForce GTX 460 (OEM) should be a lot (more or less 117%) faster with regards to full screen anti-aliasing than the Radeon HD 4790, and should be able to handle higher screen resolutions without slowing down too much. (explain)

GeForce GTX 460 (OEM)		20800 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 4790		9600 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 11200 (117%)

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 (measured in MB per second) that can be transported across the external memory interface in a second. It is worked out by multiplying the card's bus width by the speed of its memory. In the case of DDR type RAM, the result should be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher the bandwidth is, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, HDR and high resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum texture map elements (texels) that are processed in one second. This figure is calculated by multiplying the total amount of texture units by the core clock speed of the chip. The higher this number, the better the video 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 maximum amount of pixels the video card can possibly write to its local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is calculated by multiplying the number of Raster Operations Pipelines by the clock speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also sometimes called Render Output Units) are responsible for filling the screen with pixels (the image). The actual pixel rate is also dependant on lots of other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the potential to reach the max fill rate.