GeForce GTX 460 SE vs Radeon HD 7790

Intro

Compare those specs to the Radeon HD 7790, which makes use of a 28 nm design. AMD has set the core frequency at 1000 MHz. The GDDR5 RAM runs at a frequency of 1500 MHz on this model. It features 896 SPUs as well as 56 Texture Address Units and 16 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon HD 7790		85 Watts
GeForce GTX 460 SE		150 Watts
	Difference: 65 Watts (76%)

Memory Bandwidth

The GeForce GTX 460 SE should in theory perform a little bit faster than the Radeon HD 7790 overall. (explain)

GeForce GTX 460 SE		108800 MB/sec
Radeon HD 7790		96000 MB/sec
	Difference: 12800 (13%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 7790 will be quite a bit (about 79%) more effective at AF than the GeForce GTX 460 SE. (explain)

Radeon HD 7790		56000 Mtexels/sec
GeForce GTX 460 SE		31200 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 24800 (79%)

Pixel Rate

If using a high screen resolution is important to you, then the GeForce GTX 460 SE is the winner, by a large margin. (explain)

GeForce GTX 460 SE		20800 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 7790		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: Memory bandwidth is the max amount of information (in units of megabytes per second) that can be transported past the external memory interface within a second. It is worked out by multiplying the bus width by the speed of its memory. If the card has DDR type memory, the result should be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher the card's memory bandwidth, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, HDR and high resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum texture map elements (texels) that are applied in one second. This is calculated by multiplying the total number of texture units by the core clock speed of the chip. The better this number, the better the 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 most pixels the video card can possibly record to its local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is calculated by multiplying the amount of colour ROPs by the the card's clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also sometimes called Render Output Units) are responsible for drawing the pixels (image) on the screen. The actual pixel output rate also depends on lots of other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the ability to reach the max fill rate.