GeForce GTX 260 216SP 55 nm vs Radeon HD 4890 2GB

Intro

Compare all of that to the Radeon HD 4890 2GB, which comes with GPU core speed of 1000 MHz, and 2048 MB of GDDR5 RAM set to run at 975 MHz through a 256-bit bus. It also features 800(160x5) Stream Processors, 40 TAUs, and 16 Raster Operation Units.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce GTX 260 216SP 55 nm		171 Watts
Radeon HD 4890 2GB		190 Watts
	Difference: 19 Watts (11%)

Memory Bandwidth

In theory, the Radeon HD 4890 2GB should perform a bit faster than the GeForce GTX 260 216SP 55 nm in general. (explain)

Radeon HD 4890 2GB		124800 MB/sec
GeForce GTX 260 216SP 55 nm		111888 MB/sec
	Difference: 12912 (12%)

Texel Rate

The GeForce GTX 260 216SP 55 nm should be a bit (more or less 4%) more effective at anisotropic filtering than the Radeon HD 4890 2GB. (explain)

GeForce GTX 260 216SP 55 nm		41472 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 4890 2GB		40000 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 1472 (4%)

Pixel Rate

The GeForce GTX 260 216SP 55 nm is a little bit (more or less 1%) more effective at full screen anti-aliasing than the Radeon HD 4890 2GB, and will be able to handle higher resolutions better. (explain)

GeForce GTX 260 216SP 55 nm		16128 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 4890 2GB		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 max amount of information (counted in megabytes per second) that can be moved past the external memory interface in a second. It's worked out by multiplying the card's bus width by the speed of its memory. If the card has DDR RAM, it should be multiplied by 2 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 applied in one second. This figure is worked out by multiplying the total amount of texture units by the core clock speed of the chip. The better this number, the better the video card will be at handling texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels processed in a second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels that the graphics card could possibly write to its local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is calculated by multiplying the number of colour ROPs by the the core speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - aka Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel fill rate also depends on many other factors, especially the memory bandwidth - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the potential to get to the max fill rate.