GeForce GTX 460 vs Radeon HD 4730

Intro

Compare those specs to the Radeon HD 4730, which features clock speeds of 700 MHz on the GPU, and 900 MHz on the 512 MB of GDDR5 RAM. It features 640(128x5) SPUs along with 32 TAUs 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		150 Watts
	Difference: 10 Watts (7%)

Memory Bandwidth

The GeForce GTX 460 should in theory be a lot faster than the Radeon HD 4730 in general. (explain)

GeForce GTX 460		86400 MB/sec
Radeon HD 4730		57600 MB/sec
	Difference: 28800 (50%)

Texel Rate

The GeForce GTX 460 is a lot (about 69%) more effective at anisotropic filtering than the Radeon HD 4730. (explain)

GeForce GTX 460		37800 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 4730		22400 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 15400 (69%)

Pixel Rate

The GeForce GTX 460 will be a lot (about 189%) more effective at FSAA than the Radeon HD 4730, and should be able to handle higher screen resolutions more effectively. (explain)

GeForce GTX 460		16200 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 4730		5600 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 10600 (189%)

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 megabytes per second) that can be transferred over the external memory interface within a second. It is calculated by multiplying the bus width by the speed of its memory. In the case of DDR memory, the result should be multiplied by 2 once again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher the memory bandwidth, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, HDR and high resolutions.

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