Geforce GTX 670 vs Radeon HD 4870 512MB

Intro

Compare all of that to the Radeon HD 4870 512MB, which uses a 55 nm design. AMD has set the core speed at 750 MHz. The GDDR5 memory is set to run at a speed of 900 MHz on this card. It features 800(160x5) SPUs along with 40 TAUs and 16 Rasterization Operator Units.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon HD 4870 512MB		150 Watts
Geforce GTX 670		170 Watts
	Difference: 20 Watts (13%)

Memory Bandwidth

The Geforce GTX 670, in theory, should perform quite a bit faster than the Radeon HD 4870 512MB overall. (explain)

Geforce GTX 670		192000 MB/sec
Radeon HD 4870 512MB		115200 MB/sec
	Difference: 76800 (67%)

Texel Rate

The Geforce GTX 670 will be quite a bit (about 242%) faster with regards to anisotropic filtering than the Radeon HD 4870 512MB. (explain)

Geforce GTX 670		102480 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 4870 512MB		30000 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 72480 (242%)

Pixel Rate

If running with lots of anti-aliasing is important to you, then the Geforce GTX 670 is superior to the Radeon HD 4870 512MB, and very much so. (explain)

Geforce GTX 670		29280 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 4870 512MB		12000 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 17280 (144%)

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 maximum amount of data (in units of megabytes per second) that can be transferred over the external memory interface in a second. It is calculated by multiplying the card's interface width by its memory speed. If it uses DDR type memory, it should be multiplied by 2 again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher the memory bandwidth, the better 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 number of texture map elements (texels) that are applied per second. This is worked out by multiplying the total amount of texture units by the core speed of the chip. The higher this number, the better the graphics card will be at handling texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels applied in a second.

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