GeForce GTX 560 vs Radeon HD 4870 2GB

Intro

Compare all of that to the Radeon HD 4870 2GB, which comes with a clock speed of 750 MHz and a GDDR5 memory frequency of 900 MHz. It also features a 256-bit bus, and makes use of a 55 nm design. It is comprised of 800(160x5) SPUs, 40 Texture Address Units, and 16 ROPs.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Both cards have the same power consumption.

Memory Bandwidth

In theory, the GeForce GTX 560 is 11% quicker than the Radeon HD 4870 2GB overall, due to its greater bandwidth. (explain)

GeForce GTX 560		128128 MB/sec
Radeon HD 4870 2GB		115200 MB/sec
	Difference: 12928 (11%)

Texel Rate

The GeForce GTX 560 should be a lot (about 51%) faster with regards to anisotropic filtering than the Radeon HD 4870 2GB. (explain)

GeForce GTX 560		45360 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 4870 2GB		30000 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 15360 (51%)

Pixel Rate

If using a high resolution is important to you, then the GeForce GTX 560 is superior to the Radeon HD 4870 2GB, by a large margin. (explain)

GeForce GTX 560		25920 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 4870 2GB		12000 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 13920 (116%)

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 data (measured in MB per second) that can be moved past the external memory interface within a second. The number is calculated by multiplying the interface width by its memory clock speed. In the case of DDR memory, it must be multiplied by 2 once again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher the bandwidth is, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, High Dynamic Range and higher screen resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum amount of texture map elements (texels) that can be applied in one second. This number is calculated by multiplying the total texture units by the core speed of the chip. The better the texel rate, the better the graphics card will be at handling texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels applied per second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum amount of pixels that the graphics chip could possibly write to the local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is worked out by multiplying the number of Raster Operations Pipelines by the clock 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 lots of other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to get to the maximum fill rate.