GeForce 8800 GS vs Radeon HD 6790

Intro

Compare all of that to the Radeon HD 6790, which makes use of a 40 nm design. AMD has clocked the core speed at 840 MHz. The GDDR5 RAM runs at a speed of 1050 MHz on this model. It features 800 SPUs along with 40 TAUs and 16 Rasterization Operator Units.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce 8800 GS		105 Watts
Radeon HD 6790		150 Watts
	Difference: 45 Watts (43%)

Memory Bandwidth

In theory, the Radeon HD 6790 should perform a lot faster than the GeForce 8800 GS overall. (explain)

Radeon HD 6790		134400 MB/sec
GeForce 8800 GS		38400 MB/sec
	Difference: 96000 (250%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 6790 will be a lot (more or less 27%) better at AF than the GeForce 8800 GS. (explain)

Radeon HD 6790		33600 Mtexels/sec
GeForce 8800 GS		26400 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 7200 (27%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon HD 6790 should be much (about 104%) faster with regards to AA than the GeForce 8800 GS, and also should be capable of handling higher screen resolutions without losing too much performance. (explain)

Radeon HD 6790		13440 Mpixels/sec
GeForce 8800 GS		6600 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 6840 (104%)

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 MB per second) that can be moved past the external memory interface within a second. It's calculated by multiplying the bus width by its memory clock speed. If it uses DDR type RAM, it must be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher the memory bandwidth, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, High Dynamic Range and higher screen resolutions.

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

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels the graphics card can possibly record to the local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is calculated by multiplying the number of ROPs by the clock speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - sometimes also referred to as Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel rate also depends on lots of other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the ability to reach the max fill rate.