GeForce GT 320 vs Radeon HD 4790

Intro

Compare that to the Radeon HD 4790, which comes with GPU core speed of 600 MHz, and 512 MB of GDDR5 RAM running at 800 MHz through a 256-bit bus. It also is made up of 640(128x5) SPUs, 32 Texture Address Units, and 16 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Memory Bandwidth

In theory, the Radeon HD 4790 will be 305% faster than the GeForce GT 320 overall, because of its higher bandwidth. (explain)

Radeon HD 4790		102400 MB/sec
GeForce GT 320		25280 MB/sec
	Difference: 77120 (305%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 4790 should be much (about 48%) more effective at anisotropic filtering than the GeForce GT 320. (explain)

Radeon HD 4790		19200 Mtexels/sec
GeForce GT 320		12960 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 6240 (48%)

Pixel Rate

If using high levels of AA is important to you, then the Radeon HD 4790 is a better choice, and very much so. (explain)

Radeon HD 4790		9600 Mpixels/sec
GeForce GT 320		4320 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 5280 (122%)

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 maximum amount of data (measured in MB per second) that can be moved past the external memory interface in one second. It's calculated by multiplying the card's interface width by its memory speed. If it uses DDR type memory, the result should be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The better the bandwidth is, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, High Dynamic Range and higher screen resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum amount of texture map elements (texels) that can be applied per second. This figure is worked out by multiplying the total number of texture units by the core clock speed of the chip. The better this number, the better the card will be at handling 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 that the graphics chip could possibly write to its local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is calculated by multiplying the amount of Render Output Units by the clock speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also sometimes called Render Output Units) are responsible for filling the screen with pixels (the image). The actual pixel fill rate is also dependant on many other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the ability to get to the maximum fill rate.