GeForce GTX 480 vs Radeon HD 4790

Intro

Compare all of that to the Radeon HD 4790, which comes with GPU core speed of 600 MHz, and 512 MB of GDDR5 RAM running at 800 MHz through a 256-bit bus. It also is made up of 640(128x5) Stream Processors, 32 Texture Address Units, and 16 Raster Operation Units.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Memory Bandwidth

The GeForce GTX 480 should theoretically be quite a bit faster than the Radeon HD 4790 overall. (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 (more or less 119%) more effective at texture filtering than the Radeon HD 4790. (explain)

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

Pixel Rate

If running with a high resolution is important to you, then the GeForce GTX 480 is a better choice, by far. (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 data (measured in MB per second) that can be moved past the external memory interface in one second. It's calculated by multiplying the interface width by the speed of its memory. If the card has DDR RAM, it should be multiplied by 2 once again. If DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The higher the memory bandwidth, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, HDR and high resolutions.

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

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum amount of pixels the video card could possibly record to its local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is worked out by multiplying the number of Raster Operations Pipelines by the the core clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also called Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel fill rate is also dependant 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.