GeForce RTX 4090 vs Radeon RX 7900 XTX

Intro

The GeForce RTX 4090 makes use of a 4 nm design. nVidia has clocked the core frequency at 2235 MHz. The GDDR6X RAM runs at a frequency of 1325 MHz on this particular card. It features 16384 SPUs along with 512 Texture Address Units and 176 Rasterization Operator Units.

Compare those specs to the Radeon RX 7900 XTX, which makes use of a 5 nm design. AMD has clocked the core frequency at 1855 MHz. The GDDR6 memory is set to run at a speed of 2500 MHz on this card. It features 6144 SPUs as well as 384 TAUs and 192 Rasterization Operator Units.

Price Comparison

Specifications

Memory Bandwidth: Bandwidth is the max amount of data (counted in MB per second) that can be transported past the external memory interface in a second. It is worked out by multiplying the interface width by the speed of its memory. In the case of DDR type RAM, it must be multiplied by 2 once again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The better the bandwidth is, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, HDR and higher screen resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum number of texture map elements (texels) that can be processed in one second. This is calculated by multiplying the total number of texture units of the card by the core clock 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 processed in a second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum amount of pixels the graphics card can possibly write to the local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is calculated by multiplying the amount 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 output rate also depends on lots of other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the ability to get to the max fill rate.