GeForce GTX 280 vs Radeon HD 6790

Intro

Compare those specs 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 as well as 40 TAUs and 16 ROPs.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon HD 6790		150 Watts
GeForce GTX 280		236 Watts
	Difference: 86 Watts (57%)

Memory Bandwidth

In theory, the GeForce GTX 280 should perform a little bit faster than the Radeon HD 6790 overall. (explain)

GeForce GTX 280		141696 MB/sec
Radeon HD 6790		134400 MB/sec
	Difference: 7296 (5%)

Texel Rate

The GeForce GTX 280 should be a lot (about 43%) better at anisotropic filtering than the Radeon HD 6790. (explain)

GeForce GTX 280		48160 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 6790		33600 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 14560 (43%)

Pixel Rate

The GeForce GTX 280 is much (about 43%) better at FSAA than the Radeon HD 6790, and also will be able to handle higher resolutions without losing too much performance. (explain)

GeForce GTX 280		19264 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 6790		13440 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 5824 (43%)

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 megabytes per second) that can be moved across the external memory interface within a second. The number is worked out by multiplying the card's bus width by the speed of its memory. If the card has DDR RAM, it must be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher the bandwidth is, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, HDR and higher screen resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum number of texture map elements (texels) that can be processed in one second. This figure is calculated by multiplying the total number of texture units by the core 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 per second.

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