GeForce GTX 460 vs Radeon HD 4790

Intro

Compare all of that to the Radeon HD 4790, which has core 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

The Radeon HD 4790 should in theory perform just a bit faster than the GeForce GTX 460 in general. (explain)

Radeon HD 4790		102400 MB/sec
GeForce GTX 460		86400 MB/sec
	Difference: 16000 (19%)

Texel Rate

The GeForce GTX 460 should be quite a bit (more or less 97%) faster with regards to texture filtering than the Radeon HD 4790. (explain)

GeForce GTX 460		37800 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 4790		19200 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 18600 (97%)

Pixel Rate

If using high levels of AA is important to you, then the GeForce GTX 460 is the winner, and very much so. (explain)

GeForce GTX 460		16200 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 4790		9600 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 6600 (69%)

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 maximum amount of data (counted in MB per second) that can be transferred past the external memory interface in a second. The number is worked out by multiplying the bus width by the speed of its memory. If it uses DDR type memory, it should be multiplied by 2 once again. If it uses 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 higher screen resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum texture map elements (texels) that can be applied in one second. This figure is calculated by multiplying the total amount of texture units by the core clock speed of the chip. The higher the texel rate, the better the video card will be at texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels in one second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum number of pixels the graphics card can possibly record to its local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is worked out by multiplying the number of ROPs by the clock 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 fill rate is also dependant on many other factors, especially the memory bandwidth - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the ability to get to the max fill rate.