Geforce GTX 670 vs Radeon HD 4870 2GB

Intro

Compare all that to the Radeon HD 4870 2GB, which features core speeds of 750 MHz on the GPU, and 900 MHz on the 2048 MB of GDDR5 RAM. 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 2GB		150 Watts
Geforce GTX 670		170 Watts
	Difference: 20 Watts (13%)

Memory Bandwidth

In theory, the Geforce GTX 670 should be a lot faster than the Radeon HD 4870 2GB in general. (explain)

Geforce GTX 670		192000 MB/sec
Radeon HD 4870 2GB		115200 MB/sec
	Difference: 76800 (67%)

Texel Rate

The Geforce GTX 670 is much (more or less 242%) more effective at anisotropic filtering than the Radeon HD 4870 2GB. (explain)

Geforce GTX 670		102480 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 4870 2GB		30000 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 72480 (242%)

Pixel Rate

The Geforce GTX 670 will be much (approximately 144%) faster with regards to full screen anti-aliasing than the Radeon HD 4870 2GB, and also will be able to handle higher resolutions more effectively. (explain)

Geforce GTX 670		29280 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 4870 2GB		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: Bandwidth is the largest amount of data (counted in MB per second) that can be transferred across the external memory interface in one second. It is calculated by multiplying the card's bus width by its memory clock speed. In the case of DDR type RAM, the result should be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The better the bandwidth is, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, HDR and high resolutions.

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

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels that the graphics chip can possibly write to its local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is worked out by multiplying the amount of ROPs by the the core speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also sometimes called Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel fill rate is also dependant on many other factors, especially the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the potential to get to the maximum fill rate.