GeForce GTX 460 (OEM) vs Radeon HD 4790

Intro

Compare that to the Radeon HD 4790, which comes with clock speeds of 600 MHz on the GPU, and 800 MHz on the 512 MB of GDDR5 memory. It features 640(128x5) SPUs as well as 32 Texture Address Units and 16 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Memory Bandwidth

As far as performance goes, the GeForce GTX 460 (OEM) should in theory be a small bit better than the Radeon HD 4790 overall. (explain)

GeForce GTX 460 (OEM)		108800 MB/sec
Radeon HD 4790		102400 MB/sec
	Difference: 6400 (6%)

Texel Rate

The GeForce GTX 460 (OEM) should be much (about 90%) faster with regards to AF than the Radeon HD 4790. (explain)

GeForce GTX 460 (OEM)		36400 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 4790		19200 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 17200 (90%)

Pixel Rate

The GeForce GTX 460 (OEM) will be quite a bit (more or less 117%) more effective at full screen anti-aliasing than the Radeon HD 4790, and also should be capable of handling higher resolutions without losing too much performance. (explain)

GeForce GTX 460 (OEM)		20800 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 4790		9600 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 11200 (117%)

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: Memory bandwidth is the max amount of data (in units of MB per second) that can be transported past the external memory interface in one second. It is worked out by multiplying the card's bus width by its memory speed. If it uses DDR type RAM, it must be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. 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 texture map elements (texels) that are applied per second. This number is worked out by multiplying the total amount of texture units by the core speed of the chip. The better the texel rate, the better the graphics card will be at 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 that the graphics chip can possibly write to the local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is worked out by multiplying the number of Render Output Units 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, especially the memory bandwidth - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the ability to get to the max fill rate.