GeForce GTX 460 1GB vs Radeon HD 4650 1GB

Intro

The GeForce GTX 460 1GB makes use of a 40 nm design. nVidia has clocked the core frequency at 675 MHz. The GDDR5 RAM is set to run at a speed of 900 MHz on this specific model. It features 336 SPUs along with 56 Texture Address Units and 32 Rasterization Operator Units.

Compare all of that to the Radeon HD 4650 1GB, which makes use of a 55 nm design. AMD has clocked the core frequency at 600 MHz. The GDDR3 RAM is set to run at a speed of 700 MHz on this particular model. It features 320(64x5) SPUs as well as 32 Texture Address Units and 8 Rasterization Operator Units.

Price Comparison

Specifications

Memory Bandwidth: Bandwidth is the maximum amount of data (measured in megabytes per second) that can be transported past the external memory interface within a second. The number is calculated by multiplying the card's bus width by the speed of its memory. If the card has DDR RAM, it should be multiplied by 2 once again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The better the memory bandwidth, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, HDR and higher screen resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum number of texture map elements (texels) that can be applied in one second. This is calculated by multiplying the total number of texture units by the core clock speed of the chip. The higher this number, the better the graphics card will be at 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 chip can possibly write to its local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is calculated by multiplying the number of colour ROPs by the the core speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - aka Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel rate is also dependant on quite a few other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the ability to get to the maximum fill rate.