GeForce 8800 GTX vs Radeon HD 7790

Intro

Compare all that to the Radeon HD 7790, which has a GPU core clock speed of 1000 MHz, and 1024 MB of GDDR5 RAM set to run at 1500 MHz through a 128-bit bus. It also is made up of 896 SPUs, 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 8800 GTX		155 Watts
	Difference: 70 Watts (82%)

Memory Bandwidth

In theory, the Radeon HD 7790 should be a bit faster than the GeForce 8800 GTX overall. (explain)

Radeon HD 7790		96000 MB/sec
GeForce 8800 GTX		86400 MB/sec
	Difference: 9600 (11%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 7790 should be much (more or less 52%) better at texture filtering than the GeForce 8800 GTX. (explain)

Radeon HD 7790		56000 Mtexels/sec
GeForce 8800 GTX		36800 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 19200 (52%)

Pixel Rate

If running with lots of anti-aliasing is important to you, then the Radeon HD 7790 is a better choice, but only just. (explain)

Radeon HD 7790		16000 Mpixels/sec
GeForce 8800 GTX		13800 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 2200 (16%)

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 data (measured in MB per second) that can be transported past the external memory interface within a second. It's calculated by multiplying the bus width by the speed of its memory. In the case of DDR type memory, it should be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher the 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 number of texture map elements (texels) that are processed in one second. This 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 applied per second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum number of pixels that the graphics card could possibly write to the local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is calculated by multiplying the amount of Render Output Units by the the card's clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also sometimes called Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel rate also depends on quite a few other factors, especially the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the ability to get to the max fill rate.