GeForce GTX 260 Core 216 vs Radeon HD 7790

Intro

Compare those specs to the Radeon HD 7790, which features clock speeds of 1000 MHz on the GPU, and 1500 MHz on the 1024 MB of GDDR5 memory. It features 896 SPUs as well as 56 Texture Address Units and 16 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon HD 7790		85 Watts
GeForce GTX 260 Core 216		202 Watts
	Difference: 117 Watts (138%)

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically speaking, the GeForce GTX 260 Core 216 should be a little bit faster than the Radeon HD 7790 overall. (explain)

GeForce GTX 260 Core 216		111888 MB/sec
Radeon HD 7790		96000 MB/sec
	Difference: 15888 (17%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 7790 should be much (about 35%) more effective at anisotropic filtering than the GeForce GTX 260 Core 216. (explain)

Radeon HD 7790		56000 Mtexels/sec
GeForce GTX 260 Core 216		41472 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 14528 (35%)

Pixel Rate

If running with lots of anti-aliasing is important to you, then the GeForce GTX 260 Core 216 is superior to the Radeon HD 7790, though only just barely. (explain)

GeForce GTX 260 Core 216		16128 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 7790		16000 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 128 (1%)

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 information (measured in megabytes per second) that can be transported past the external memory interface within a second. It's calculated by multiplying the card's bus width by its memory clock speed. In the case of DDR RAM, it should be multiplied by 2 once 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, High Dynamic Range and high resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum amount of texture map elements (texels) that can be applied per second. This figure is calculated by multiplying the total texture units of the card by the core speed of the chip. The higher the texel rate, the better the video card will be at handling texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels processed per second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum amount of pixels that the graphics chip can possibly record to the 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 outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel fill rate also depends on quite a few other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the potential to reach the max fill rate.