GeForce GTX 970M vs Radeon HD 4790

Intro

Compare all that to the Radeon HD 4790, which has clock speeds of 600 MHz on the GPU, and 800 MHz on the 512 MB of GDDR5 memory. It features 640(128x5) SPUs along with 32 Texture Address Units and 16 Rasterization Operator Units.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically speaking, the Radeon HD 4790 should perform a small bit faster than the GeForce GTX 970M overall. (explain)

Radeon HD 4790		102400 MB/sec
GeForce GTX 970M		96000 MB/sec
	Difference: 6400 (7%)

Texel Rate

The GeForce GTX 970M should be much (about 285%) better at texture filtering than the Radeon HD 4790. (explain)

GeForce GTX 970M		73920 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 4790		19200 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 54720 (285%)

Pixel Rate

The GeForce GTX 970M should be quite a bit (approximately 362%) better at anti-aliasing than the Radeon HD 4790, and able to handle higher screen resolutions while still performing well. (explain)

GeForce GTX 970M		44352 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 4790		9600 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 34752 (362%)

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 largest amount of information (measured in MB per second) that can be moved over the external memory interface in one second. It's worked out by multiplying the card's interface width by its memory speed. If the card has DDR type memory, the result should be multiplied by 2 once again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The higher the card's memory bandwidth, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, HDR and higher screen resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum amount of texture map elements (texels) that are applied per second. This number is calculated by multiplying the total amount of texture units of the card by the core 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 processed in one second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum amount of pixels the video card could possibly write to its local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is worked out by multiplying the number of colour ROPs by the the core clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also called Render Output Units) are responsible for filling the screen with pixels (the image). The actual pixel fill rate is also dependant on lots of other factors, especially the memory bandwidth - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the potential to reach the maximum fill rate.