Geforce GTX 670 vs Radeon HD 4870 X2

Intro

Compare all that to the Radeon HD 4870 X2, which has core clock speeds of 750 MHz on the GPU, and 900 MHz on the 1024 MB of GDDR5 memory. It features 800(160x5) SPUs as well as 40 TAUs and 16 Rasterization Operator Units.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Geforce GTX 670		170 Watts
Radeon HD 4870 X2		350 Watts
	Difference: 180 Watts (106%)

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically speaking, the Radeon HD 4870 X2 is 20% faster than the Geforce GTX 670 overall, due to its greater data rate. (explain)

Radeon HD 4870 X2		230400 MB/sec
Geforce GTX 670		192000 MB/sec
	Difference: 38400 (20%)

Texel Rate

The Geforce GTX 670 is a lot (more or less 71%) better at anisotropic filtering than the Radeon HD 4870 X2. (explain)

Geforce GTX 670		102480 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 4870 X2		60000 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 42480 (71%)

Pixel Rate

The Geforce GTX 670 should be a lot (approximately 22%) faster with regards to full screen anti-aliasing than the Radeon HD 4870 X2, and also will be capable of handling higher resolutions more effectively. (explain)

Geforce GTX 670		29280 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 4870 X2		24000 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 5280 (22%)

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.

One or more cards in this comparison are multi-core. This means that their bandwidth, texel and pixel rates are theoretically doubled - this does not mean the card will actually perform twice as fast, but only that it should in theory be able to. Actual game benchmarks will give a more accurate idea of what it's capable of.

Price Comparison

Specifications

Memory Bandwidth: Bandwidth is the largest amount of information (measured in MB per second) that can be moved past the external memory interface within a second. It's calculated by multiplying the card's bus width by its memory clock speed. If it uses DDR type RAM, it should be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The higher the memory bandwidth, 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 texture map elements (texels) that can be 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 this number, the better the card will be at handling texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels processed in one second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum number of pixels that the graphics card could possibly record to the local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is worked out by multiplying the number of Render Output Units by the the core speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - aka Render Output Units) are responsible for filling the screen with pixels (the image). The actual pixel output rate also depends on quite a few other factors, especially the memory bandwidth - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the ability to get to the max fill rate.