GeForce GTX 460 2GB vs Radeon HD 4890 2GB

Intro

Compare those specs to the Radeon HD 4890 2GB, which has core clock speeds of 1000 MHz on the GPU, and 975 MHz on the 2048 MB of GDDR5 memory. It features 800(160x5) SPUs along with 40 Texture Address Units and 16 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce GTX 460 2GB		160 Watts
Radeon HD 4890 2GB		190 Watts
	Difference: 30 Watts (19%)

Memory Bandwidth

The Radeon HD 4890 2GB should in theory perform a little bit faster than the GeForce GTX 460 2GB overall. (explain)

Radeon HD 4890 2GB		124800 MB/sec
GeForce GTX 460 2GB		115200 MB/sec
	Difference: 9600 (8%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 4890 2GB is a small bit (about 6%) faster with regards to anisotropic filtering than the GeForce GTX 460 2GB. (explain)

Radeon HD 4890 2GB		40000 Mtexels/sec
GeForce GTX 460 2GB		37800 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 2200 (6%)

Pixel Rate

The GeForce GTX 460 2GB will be a lot (about 35%) faster with regards to AA than the Radeon HD 4890 2GB, and able to handle higher screen resolutions while still performing well. (explain)

GeForce GTX 460 2GB		21600 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 4890 2GB		16000 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 5600 (35%)

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 (in units of megabytes per second) that can be transferred past the external memory interface within a second. It is worked out by multiplying the interface width by the speed of its memory. In the case of DDR type RAM, it must be multiplied by 2 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, High Dynamic Range and high resolutions.

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

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels that the graphics chip can possibly write to its local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is calculated by multiplying the number of Render Output Units 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 many other factors, especially the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the potential to get to the maximum fill rate.