GeForce GTS 150 vs Radeon HD 6790

Intro

Compare all that to the Radeon HD 6790, which comes with GPU clock speed of 840 MHz, and 1024 MB of GDDR5 memory set to run at 1050 MHz through a 256-bit bus. It also is comprised of 800 Stream Processors, 40 Texture Address Units, and 16 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce GTS 150		141 Watts
Radeon HD 6790		150 Watts
	Difference: 9 Watts (6%)

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically speaking, the Radeon HD 6790 should be 320% quicker than the GeForce GTS 150 overall, because of its greater bandwidth. (explain)

Radeon HD 6790		134400 MB/sec
GeForce GTS 150		32000 MB/sec
	Difference: 102400 (320%)

Texel Rate

The GeForce GTS 150 should be much (about 41%) better at anisotropic filtering than the Radeon HD 6790. (explain)

GeForce GTS 150		47360 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 6790		33600 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 13760 (41%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon HD 6790 is a little bit (about 14%) faster with regards to full screen anti-aliasing than the GeForce GTS 150, and will be able to handle higher screen resolutions more effectively. (explain)

Radeon HD 6790		13440 Mpixels/sec
GeForce GTS 150		11840 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 1600 (14%)

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 information (measured in MB per second) that can be transported across the external memory interface in one second. It's calculated by multiplying the interface width by the speed of its memory. If it uses DDR RAM, it must be multiplied by 2 once again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher the card's memory bandwidth, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, HDR and higher screen resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum texture map elements (texels) that can be processed in one second. This is worked out by multiplying the total number of texture units of the card by the core speed of the chip. The better the texel rate, the better the card will be at 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 write to the local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is worked out by multiplying the amount of colour ROPs by the the card's clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - aka Render Output Units) are responsible for drawing the pixels (image) on the screen. The actual pixel output rate is also dependant on lots of other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the ability to reach the maximum fill rate.