GeForce GTX 460 (OEM) vs Radeon HD 6790

Intro

Compare all of that to the Radeon HD 6790, which features a GPU core clock speed of 840 MHz, and 1024 MB of GDDR5 memory running at 1050 MHz through a 256-bit bus. It also is made up of 800 Stream Processors, 40 TAUs, and 16 ROPs.

(No game benchmarks for this combination yet.)

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Both cards have the same power consumption.

Memory Bandwidth

As far as performance goes, the Radeon HD 6790 should theoretically be much better than the GeForce GTX 460 (OEM) overall. (explain)

Radeon HD 6790		134400 MB/sec
GeForce GTX 460 (OEM)		108800 MB/sec
	Difference: 25600 (24%)

Texel Rate

The GeForce GTX 460 (OEM) will be just a bit (more or less 8%) faster with regards to AF than the Radeon HD 6790. (explain)

GeForce GTX 460 (OEM)		36400 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 6790		33600 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 2800 (8%)

Pixel Rate

If using a high screen resolution is important to you, then the GeForce GTX 460 (OEM) is the winner, by far. (explain)

GeForce GTX 460 (OEM)		20800 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 6790		13440 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 7360 (55%)

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 max amount of data (measured in megabytes per second) that can be moved across the external memory interface in a second. The number is calculated by multiplying the bus width by the speed of its memory. If the card has DDR type RAM, it must be multiplied by 2 again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The better the bandwidth is, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, HDR and high resolutions.

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

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum number of pixels the video card could possibly write to the local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is worked out by multiplying the amount of Render Output Units 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 output rate also depends on quite a few other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the ability to reach the max fill rate.