GeForce GTX 460 (OEM) vs Radeon HD 4730

Intro

Compare all that to the Radeon HD 4730, which comes with a core clock frequency of 700 MHz and a GDDR5 memory speed of 900 MHz. It also uses a 128-bit memory bus, and uses a 55 nm design. It is comprised of 640(128x5) SPUs, 32 Texture Address Units, and 8 ROPs.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon HD 4730		140 Watts
GeForce GTX 460 (OEM)		150 Watts
	Difference: 10 Watts (7%)

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically speaking, the GeForce GTX 460 (OEM) is 89% faster than the Radeon HD 4730 overall, because of its greater data rate. (explain)

GeForce GTX 460 (OEM)		108800 MB/sec
Radeon HD 4730		57600 MB/sec
	Difference: 51200 (89%)

Texel Rate

The GeForce GTX 460 (OEM) will be quite a bit (approximately 63%) faster with regards to texture filtering than the Radeon HD 4730. (explain)

GeForce GTX 460 (OEM)		36400 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 4730		22400 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 14000 (63%)

Pixel Rate

If running with lots of anti-aliasing is important to you, then the GeForce GTX 460 (OEM) is the winner, by a large margin. (explain)

GeForce GTX 460 (OEM)		20800 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 4730		5600 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 15200 (271%)

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 largest amount of information (measured in MB per second) that can be transported past the external memory interface in one second. It is worked out by multiplying the bus width by its memory clock speed. If it uses DDR type RAM, it must be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. 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 higher screen resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum amount of texture map elements (texels) that can be processed in one second. This number is worked out by multiplying the total texture units by the core speed of the chip. The higher this number, the better the video card will be at handling texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels in a second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum amount of pixels the graphics card can possibly write to its local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is calculated by multiplying the number of colour ROPs by the the core speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also called Render Output Units) are responsible for filling the screen with pixels (the image). The actual pixel rate also depends on many other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the potential to reach the maximum fill rate.