GeForce GTX 260 vs Radeon HD 7990

Intro

Compare those specifications to the Radeon HD 7990, which comes with core clock speeds of 950 MHz on the GPU, and 1500 MHz on the 3072 MB of GDDR5 memory. It features 2048 SPUs along with 128 Texture Address Units and 32 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce GTX 260		182 Watts
Radeon HD 7990		375 Watts
	Difference: 193 Watts (106%)

Memory Bandwidth

In theory, the Radeon HD 7990 should be much faster than the GeForce GTX 260 in general. (explain)

Radeon HD 7990		576000 MB/sec
GeForce GTX 260		111888 MB/sec
	Difference: 464112 (415%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 7990 will be quite a bit (more or less 560%) better at anisotropic filtering than the GeForce GTX 260. (explain)

Radeon HD 7990		243200 Mtexels/sec
GeForce GTX 260		36864 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 206336 (560%)

Pixel Rate

If running with high levels of AA is important to you, then the Radeon HD 7990 is the winner, by a large margin. (explain)

Radeon HD 7990		60800 Mpixels/sec
GeForce GTX 260		16128 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 44672 (277%)

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.

One or more cards in this comparison are multi-core. This means that their bandwidth, texel and pixel rates are theoretically doubled - this does not mean the card will actually perform twice as fast, but only that it should in theory be able to. Actual game benchmarks will give a more accurate idea of what it's capable of.

Price Comparison

Specifications

Memory Bandwidth: Bandwidth is the max amount of data (measured in megabytes per second) that can be moved past the external memory interface in a second. It is worked out by multiplying the bus width by the speed of its memory. In the case of DDR RAM, it should be multiplied by 2 once again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The better the card's memory bandwidth, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, HDR and high resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum amount of texture map elements (texels) that can be applied in one second. This figure is worked out by multiplying the total texture units by the core speed of the chip. The higher this number, 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 the graphics card can possibly record to the local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is worked out by multiplying the number of Raster Operations Pipelines by the clock 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 rate also depends on quite a few other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to reach the maximum fill rate.