GeForce 8800 GTX vs Radeon HD 7790

Intro

Compare those specifications to the Radeon HD 7790, which comes with clock speeds of 1000 MHz on the GPU, and 1500 MHz on the 1024 MB of GDDR5 RAM. It features 896 SPUs as well as 56 TAUs and 16 Rasterization Operator Units.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon HD 7790		85 Watts
GeForce 8800 GTX		155 Watts
	Difference: 70 Watts (82%)

Memory Bandwidth

The Radeon HD 7790, in theory, should perform a little bit faster than the GeForce 8800 GTX in general. (explain)

Radeon HD 7790		96000 MB/sec
GeForce 8800 GTX		86400 MB/sec
	Difference: 9600 (11%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 7790 will be a lot (about 52%) faster with regards to AF than the GeForce 8800 GTX. (explain)

Radeon HD 7790		56000 Mtexels/sec
GeForce 8800 GTX		36800 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 19200 (52%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon HD 7790 should be a bit (about 16%) better at anti-aliasing than the GeForce 8800 GTX, and also should be capable of handling higher resolutions better. (explain)

Radeon HD 7790		16000 Mpixels/sec
GeForce 8800 GTX		13800 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 2200 (16%)

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 (in units of megabytes per second) that can be moved across the external memory interface in a second. It's calculated by multiplying the bus width by the speed of its memory. In the case of DDR type memory, 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, High Dynamic Range and high resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum number of texture map elements (texels) that are processed per second. This is worked out by multiplying the total amount of texture units by the core clock 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 in one second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum number of pixels that the graphics card could possibly record to the local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is worked out by multiplying the amount of colour ROPs 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 many other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the ability to get to the max fill rate.