GeForce GTX 960 vs Radeon HD 4790

Intro

Compare all that to the Radeon HD 4790, which features GPU clock speed of 600 MHz, and 512 MB of GDDR5 RAM set to run at 800 MHz through a 256-bit bus. It also is made up of 640(128x5) Stream Processors, 32 Texture Address Units, and 16 Raster Operation Units.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Memory Bandwidth

In theory, the GeForce GTX 960 should be just a bit faster than the Radeon HD 4790 overall. (explain)

GeForce GTX 960		112000 MB/sec
Radeon HD 4790		102400 MB/sec
	Difference: 9600 (9%)

Texel Rate

The GeForce GTX 960 will be much (approximately 276%) better at texture filtering than the Radeon HD 4790. (explain)

GeForce GTX 960		72128 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 4790		19200 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 52928 (276%)

Pixel Rate

If using a high screen resolution is important to you, then the GeForce GTX 960 is a better choice, and very much so. (explain)

GeForce GTX 960		36064 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 4790		9600 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 26464 (276%)

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 maximum amount of data (in units of megabytes per second) that can be moved past the external memory interface in a second. The number is worked out by multiplying the bus width by its memory clock speed. If the card has DDR type RAM, it must be multiplied by 2 once again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The better 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 amount of texture map elements (texels) that are processed in one second. This is worked out by multiplying the total amount of texture units of the card by the core clock speed of the chip. The higher the texel rate, the better the card will be at handling texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels processed per second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels the video card could possibly record to its local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is calculated by multiplying the number of ROPs by the clock speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - aka Render Output Units) are responsible for drawing the pixels (image) on the screen. The actual pixel rate also depends on many other factors, especially the memory bandwidth - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the ability to reach the maximum fill rate.