GeForce GTX 460 vs Radeon HD 4790

Intro

Compare those specifications to the Radeon HD 4790, which features GPU core speed of 600 MHz, and 512 MB of GDDR5 memory running at 800 MHz through a 256-bit bus. It also features 640(128x5) SPUs, 32 TAUs, and 16 Raster Operation Units.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically speaking, the Radeon HD 4790 is 19% quicker than the GeForce GTX 460 in general, due to its greater data rate. (explain)

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

Texel Rate

The GeForce GTX 460 will be a lot (about 97%) more effective at AF than the Radeon HD 4790. (explain)

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

Pixel Rate

If running with a high screen resolution is important to you, then the GeForce GTX 460 is superior to the Radeon HD 4790, by a large margin. (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: Bandwidth is the largest amount of data (in units of MB per second) that can be transported across the external memory interface within a second. It is worked out by multiplying the card's bus width by the speed of its memory. If the card has DDR type RAM, the result should be multiplied by 2 again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher the 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 are processed per second. This figure is calculated by multiplying the total number of texture units of the card by the core clock speed of the chip. The higher the texel rate, the better the video card will be at handling texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels applied in a second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum amount of pixels the video card can possibly write to the local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is calculated by multiplying the number of colour ROPs by the the core speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also called Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel output rate is also dependant on many other factors, especially the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the potential to get to the max fill rate.