GeForce GTX 470 vs Radeon HD 4790

Intro

Compare those specifications to the Radeon HD 4790, which has a clock frequency of 600 MHz and a GDDR5 memory frequency of 800 MHz. It also makes use of a 256-bit memory bus, and makes use of a 55 nm design. It features 640(128x5) SPUs, 32 TAUs, and 16 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Memory Bandwidth

As far as performance goes, the GeForce GTX 470 should in theory be quite a bit superior to the Radeon HD 4790 overall. (explain)

GeForce GTX 470		133920 MB/sec
Radeon HD 4790		102400 MB/sec
	Difference: 31520 (31%)

Texel Rate

The GeForce GTX 470 will be quite a bit (more or less 77%) faster with regards to anisotropic filtering than the Radeon HD 4790. (explain)

GeForce GTX 470		33992 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 4790		19200 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 14792 (77%)

Pixel Rate

If using high levels of AA is important to you, then the GeForce GTX 470 is a better choice, by far. (explain)

GeForce GTX 470		24280 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 4790		9600 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 14680 (153%)

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 (counted in MB per second) that can be moved over the external memory interface in a second. The number is worked out by multiplying the card's bus width by the speed of its memory. In the case of DDR memory, it should be multiplied by 2 once again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The better the card's memory bandwidth, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, HDR and higher screen resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum texture map elements (texels) that can be processed in one second. This is calculated by multiplying the total amount of texture units of the card 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 processed per second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels that the graphics chip could possibly write to its local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is calculated by multiplying the amount of colour ROPs by the the core speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also sometimes called Render Output Units) are responsible for drawing the pixels (image) on the screen. The actual pixel rate is also dependant on many 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.