GeForce GTX 295 vs Radeon HD 6790

Intro

Compare all that to the Radeon HD 6790, which has clock speeds of 840 MHz on the GPU, and 1050 MHz on the 1024 MB of GDDR5 memory. It features 800 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)

Radeon HD 6790		150 Watts
GeForce GTX 295		289 Watts
	Difference: 139 Watts (93%)

Memory Bandwidth

In theory, the GeForce GTX 295 is 67% quicker than the Radeon HD 6790 in general, because of its higher data rate. (explain)

GeForce GTX 295		223776 MB/sec
Radeon HD 6790		134400 MB/sec
	Difference: 89376 (67%)

Texel Rate

The GeForce GTX 295 will be a lot (approximately 174%) more effective at texture filtering than the Radeon HD 6790. (explain)

GeForce GTX 295		92160 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 6790		33600 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 58560 (174%)

Pixel Rate

The GeForce GTX 295 should be quite a bit (more or less 140%) better at AA than the Radeon HD 6790, and will be able to handle higher screen resolutions while still performing well. (explain)

GeForce GTX 295		32256 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 6790		13440 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 18816 (140%)

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.

One or more cards in this comparison are multi-core. This means that their bandwidth, texel and pixel rates are theoretically doubled - this does not mean the card will actually perform twice as fast, but only that it should in theory be able to. Actual game benchmarks will give a more accurate idea of what it's capable of.

Price Comparison

Specifications

Memory Bandwidth: Bandwidth is the largest amount of information (measured in MB per second) that can be moved over the external memory interface within a second. It is worked out by multiplying the card's interface width by its memory speed. If the card has DDR type RAM, the result should be multiplied by 2 once again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The better the bandwidth is, 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 figure is worked out by multiplying the total texture units of the card by the core speed of the chip. The better the texel rate, the better the video card will be at handling texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels in one second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels the video card can possibly write to the local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is worked out by multiplying the amount of Raster Operations Pipelines by the the card's clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - sometimes also referred to as Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel rate is also dependant on many other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to get to the max fill rate.