Geforce GTX 680 vs Radeon HD 4870 1GB

Intro

Compare those specs to the Radeon HD 4870 1GB, which uses a 55 nm design. AMD has set the core speed at 750 MHz. The GDDR5 RAM works at a frequency of 900 MHz on this card. It features 800(160x5) SPUs along with 40 Texture Address Units and 16 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon HD 4870 1GB		150 Watts
Geforce GTX 680		195 Watts
	Difference: 45 Watts (30%)

Memory Bandwidth

In theory, the Geforce GTX 680 should perform quite a bit faster than the Radeon HD 4870 1GB overall. (explain)

Geforce GTX 680		192256 MB/sec
Radeon HD 4870 1GB		115200 MB/sec
	Difference: 77056 (67%)

Texel Rate

The Geforce GTX 680 is quite a bit (about 329%) faster with regards to anisotropic filtering than the Radeon HD 4870 1GB. (explain)

Geforce GTX 680		128768 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 4870 1GB		30000 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 98768 (329%)

Pixel Rate

The Geforce GTX 680 is quite a bit (more or less 168%) faster with regards to anti-aliasing than the Radeon HD 4870 1GB, and capable of handling higher screen resolutions without slowing down too much. (explain)

Geforce GTX 680		32192 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 4870 1GB		12000 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 20192 (168%)

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 max amount of information (counted in MB per second) that can be transferred across the external memory interface within a second. It is calculated by multiplying the bus width by its memory clock speed. In the case of DDR memory, the result should be multiplied by 2 once again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher the card's memory bandwidth, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, HDR and higher screen resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum number of texture map elements (texels) that are processed in one second. This figure is worked out by multiplying the total number of texture units by the core clock speed of the chip. The better the texel rate, the better the card will be at texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels per second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels that the graphics card can possibly write to its local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is calculated by multiplying the amount of Render Output Units by the the core clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - sometimes also referred to as Render Output Units) are responsible for filling the screen with pixels (the image). The actual pixel rate also depends on quite a few other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the potential to reach the max fill rate.