GeForce GTX 460 vs Radeon HD 4790

Intro

The GeForce GTX 460 uses a 40 nm design. nVidia has clocked the core frequency at 675 MHz. The GDDR5 RAM works at a frequency of 900 MHz on this model. It features 336 SPUs as well as 56 TAUs and 24 ROPs.

Compare all that to the Radeon HD 4790, which features a core clock speed of 600 MHz and a GDDR5 memory speed of 800 MHz. It also uses a 256-bit memory bus, and makes use of a 55 nm design. It is made up of 640(128x5) SPUs, 32 Texture Address Units, and 16 ROPs.

Price Comparison

Specifications

Memory Bandwidth: Memory bandwidth is the maximum amount of data (in units of MB per second) that can be transported past the external memory interface within a second. It is calculated by multiplying the card's interface width by its memory clock speed. In the case of DDR RAM, the result should be multiplied by 2 again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher the bandwidth is, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, High Dynamic Range and higher screen resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum texture map elements (texels) that are processed per second. This is worked out by multiplying the total number 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 in a second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels the video card could possibly record to the local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is calculated by multiplying the amount of Render Output Units 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 many other factors, especially the memory bandwidth - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to get to the maximum fill rate.