GeForce GTX 480 vs Radeon HD 4790

Intro

Compare those specs to the Radeon HD 4790, which has a clock frequency of 600 MHz and a GDDR5 memory speed of 800 MHz. It also features a 256-bit memory bus, and uses a 55 nm design. It is made up of 640(128x5) SPUs, 32 Texture Address Units, and 16 Raster Operation Units.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Memory Bandwidth

The GeForce GTX 480, in theory, should perform quite a bit faster than the Radeon HD 4790 in general. (explain)

GeForce GTX 480		177408 MB/sec
Radeon HD 4790		102400 MB/sec
	Difference: 75008 (73%)

Texel Rate

The GeForce GTX 480 will be a lot (approximately 119%) better at anisotropic filtering than the Radeon HD 4790. (explain)

GeForce GTX 480		42000 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 4790		19200 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 22800 (119%)

Pixel Rate

The GeForce GTX 480 is much (more or less 250%) more effective at AA than the Radeon HD 4790, and should be able to handle higher resolutions without losing too much performance. (explain)

GeForce GTX 480		33600 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 4790		9600 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 24000 (250%)

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 information (counted in MB per second) that can be transported over the external memory interface in a second. It's worked out by multiplying the card's bus width by the speed of its memory. In the case of DDR type RAM, it should be multiplied by 2 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 anti-aliasing, High Dynamic Range and higher screen resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum texture map elements (texels) that are applied per second. This number is worked out by multiplying the total number of texture units by the core clock speed of the chip. The better the texel rate, the better the card will be at texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels applied in a second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum number of pixels the graphics card can possibly write to the local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is worked out by multiplying the number of Render Output Units by the the core clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - sometimes also referred to as Render Output Units) are responsible for drawing the pixels (image) on the screen. The actual pixel fill rate also depends on lots of other factors, especially the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the ability to reach the maximum fill rate.