GeForce GTX 470 vs Radeon HD 6790

Intro

Compare those specs to the Radeon HD 6790, which comes with core clock speeds of 840 MHz on the GPU, and 1050 MHz on the 1024 MB of GDDR5 RAM. It features 800 SPUs along with 40 TAUs and 16 ROPs.

(No game benchmarks for this combination yet.)

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon HD 6790		150 Watts
GeForce GTX 470		215 Watts
	Difference: 65 Watts (43%)

Memory Bandwidth

Performance-wise, the Radeon HD 6790 should theoretically be a small bit superior to the GeForce GTX 470 overall. (explain)

Radeon HD 6790		134400 MB/sec
GeForce GTX 470		133920 MB/sec
	Difference: 480 (0%)

Texel Rate

The GeForce GTX 470 will be a bit (about 1%) more effective at anisotropic filtering than the Radeon HD 6790. (explain)

GeForce GTX 470		33992 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 6790		33600 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 392 (1%)

Pixel Rate

The GeForce GTX 470 is quite a bit (more or less 81%) better at FSAA than the Radeon HD 6790, and also should be capable of handling higher resolutions while still performing well. (explain)

GeForce GTX 470		24280 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 6790		13440 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 10840 (81%)

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 (in units of megabytes 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. If the card has DDR type RAM, it should be multiplied by 2 once again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The better the memory bandwidth, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, High Dynamic Range and high resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum amount of texture map elements (texels) that are applied per second. This figure is calculated by multiplying the total texture units of the card by the core clock 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 card can possibly write to its local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is calculated by multiplying the amount of ROPs by the the core clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also called Render Output Units) are responsible for filling the screen with pixels (the image). The actual pixel output rate also depends on quite a few other factors, especially the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the ability to get to the maximum fill rate.