GeForce GTX 570 vs Radeon HD 6790

Intro

Compare all that to the Radeon HD 6790, which comes with clock speeds of 840 MHz on the GPU, and 1050 MHz on the 1024 MB of GDDR5 memory. It features 800 SPUs along with 40 Texture Address Units and 16 Rasterization Operator Units.

(No game benchmarks for this combination yet.)

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon HD 6790		150 Watts
GeForce GTX 570		219 Watts
	Difference: 69 Watts (46%)

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically speaking, the GeForce GTX 570 should perform a bit faster than the Radeon HD 6790 in general. (explain)

GeForce GTX 570		152000 MB/sec
Radeon HD 6790		134400 MB/sec
	Difference: 17600 (13%)

Texel Rate

The GeForce GTX 570 is much (approximately 31%) better at texture filtering than the Radeon HD 6790. (explain)

GeForce GTX 570		43920 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 6790		33600 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 10320 (31%)

Pixel Rate

The GeForce GTX 570 is a lot (approximately 118%) faster with regards to anti-aliasing than the Radeon HD 6790, and also should be capable of handling higher resolutions while still performing well. (explain)

GeForce GTX 570		29280 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 6790		13440 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 15840 (118%)

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 largest amount of data (measured in MB per second) that can be transported across the external memory interface in a second. It is worked out by multiplying the card's interface width by its memory clock speed. In the case of DDR RAM, the result should be multiplied by 2 again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher 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 amount of texture map elements (texels) that are processed per second. This figure 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 applied in a second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum amount of pixels that the graphics chip could possibly record to the local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is worked out by multiplying the amount of colour ROPs by the the core speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also called Render Output Units) are responsible for filling the screen with pixels (the image). The actual pixel output rate is also dependant on lots of other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to reach the max fill rate.