GeForce GTX 470 vs Radeon HD 4790

Intro

Compare those specs to the Radeon HD 4790, which has GPU core speed of 600 MHz, and 512 MB of GDDR5 RAM running at 800 MHz through a 256-bit bus. It also is comprised of 640(128x5) SPUs, 32 Texture Address Units, and 16 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically speaking, the GeForce GTX 470 should perform much faster than 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 is a lot (about 77%) faster with regards to AF than the Radeon HD 4790. (explain)

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

Pixel Rate

The GeForce GTX 470 should be much (approximately 153%) faster with regards to full screen anti-aliasing than the Radeon HD 4790, and also should be capable of handling higher screen resolutions more effectively. (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 largest amount of data (counted in MB per second) that can be transferred past the external memory interface in a second. It is worked out by multiplying the card's bus width by its memory clock speed. If it uses DDR type memory, it should be multiplied by 2 once again. If DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The better the memory bandwidth, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, HDR and higher screen resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum texture map elements (texels) that can be applied per second. This figure is calculated 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 processed in a second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum number of 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 worked out by multiplying the number of ROPs by the the core speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also called Render Output Units) are responsible for drawing the pixels (image) on the screen. The actual pixel fill rate also depends on quite a few other factors, especially the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the ability to get to the max fill rate.