GeForce GTX 460 SE vs Radeon HD 4890 2GB

Intro

Compare those specs to the Radeon HD 4890 2GB, which comes with core speeds of 1000 MHz on the GPU, and 975 MHz on the 2048 MB of GDDR5 RAM. It features 800(160x5) SPUs along with 40 Texture Address Units and 16 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce GTX 460 SE		150 Watts
Radeon HD 4890 2GB		190 Watts
	Difference: 40 Watts (27%)

Memory Bandwidth

Performance-wise, the Radeon HD 4890 2GB should in theory be a small bit better than the GeForce GTX 460 SE overall. (explain)

Radeon HD 4890 2GB		124800 MB/sec
GeForce GTX 460 SE		108800 MB/sec
	Difference: 16000 (15%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 4890 2GB should be a lot (about 28%) faster with regards to anisotropic filtering than the GeForce GTX 460 SE. (explain)

Radeon HD 4890 2GB		40000 Mtexels/sec
GeForce GTX 460 SE		31200 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 8800 (28%)

Pixel Rate

If running with high levels of AA is important to you, then the GeForce GTX 460 SE is superior to the Radeon HD 4890 2GB, by a large margin. (explain)

GeForce GTX 460 SE		20800 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 4890 2GB		16000 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 4800 (30%)

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 data (in units of megabytes per second) that can be transported across the external memory interface within a second. The number is worked out by multiplying the bus width by its memory clock speed. If the card has DDR memory, the result should be multiplied by 2 once again. If DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The better the card's memory bandwidth, the faster 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 processed in one second. This figure is worked out by multiplying the total number of texture units of the card by the core speed of the chip. The higher the texel rate, the better the graphics card will be at handling texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels applied in one second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum number of pixels that the graphics chip can possibly write to its local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is worked out by multiplying the number of colour ROPs by the the core clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also called Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel rate is also dependant on quite a few other factors, especially the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the ability to reach the maximum fill rate.