NVIDIA GeForce GTX 460 vs Sapphire Radeon HD 7770 GHz Edition OC 1GB GDDR5 (DisplayPort)

In spite of slower graphics clock rate, the GeForce GTX 460 card has better pixel fill rate, thanks to twice as many ROPs. Having higher pixel fillrate allows the graphics card to draw more pixels on screen and off screen, which is beneficial for some 3D effects in games, or when playing at higher display resolutions.

Another important parameter, that affects overall GPU performance, is texture fillrate. This parameter is proportional to graphics clock and the number of TMUs (Texture Mapping Units). Although the Sapphire Radeon HD 7770 GHz Edition OC 1GB GDDR5 (DisplayPort) card has fewer Texture Mapping Units (TMUs), it is clocked considerably higher, which means its texture fillrate is higher. Better texture fill rate means that the graphics card can apply more textures and/or use more sophisticated 3D effects for each textured picture element, which improves games visual appearance.

Maximum Single Precision performance, measured in GFLOPS or billions of Floating Point Operations Per Second, illustrates how good the graphics card is at executing programs, that utilize single-precision floating point numbers. Generally, the faster stream processors or CUDA cores run at, and the more cores / processors the graphics card has, the higher Single Precision performance will be. The Sapphire Radeon HD 7770 GHz Edition OC 1GB GDDR5 (DisplayPort) is much faster here. Higher single-precision performance number means the GPU will perform better in general computing applications. Since CUDA cores or stream processors are also used as vertex and geometry shaders for 3D image generation, higher performance is also beneficial to games.

To speed up processing, the cards store 3D scene data, textures and intermediate data, used for image generation, in on-board memory. The video memory usually has much higher bandwidth than system RAM, and more bandwidth allows the graphics card to run at higher screen resolutions, use larger and more detailed textures, and apply more complex 3D effects and filters. Memory type, speed, and memory interface width all affect the bandwidth value. Specifically, higher memory bandwidth of the NVIDIA GeForce GTX 460 graphics card is a result of wider memory bus.