Geforce GTX 690 vs Radeon HD 4870 X2

Intro

Compare all of that to the Radeon HD 4870 X2, which has GPU core speed of 750 MHz, and 1024 MB of GDDR5 memory running at 900 MHz through a 256-bit bus. It also is made up of 800(160x5) SPUs, 40 Texture Address Units, and 16 Raster Operation Units.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Geforce GTX 690		300 Watts
Radeon HD 4870 X2		350 Watts
	Difference: 50 Watts (17%)

Memory Bandwidth

The Geforce GTX 690 should in theory perform quite a bit faster than the Radeon HD 4870 X2 overall. (explain)

Geforce GTX 690		384512 MB/sec
Radeon HD 4870 X2		230400 MB/sec
	Difference: 154112 (67%)

Texel Rate

The Geforce GTX 690 will be a lot (approximately 290%) faster with regards to anisotropic filtering than the Radeon HD 4870 X2. (explain)

Geforce GTX 690		234240 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 4870 X2		60000 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 174240 (290%)

Pixel Rate

If using a high resolution is important to you, then the Geforce GTX 690 is the winner, by a large margin. (explain)

Geforce GTX 690		58560 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 4870 X2		24000 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 34560 (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.

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 (counted in MB per second) that can be moved over the external memory interface within a second. It is worked out by multiplying the bus width by the speed of its memory. If it uses DDR memory, it must be multiplied by 2 again. If DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The better the card's 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 amount of texture map elements (texels) that are applied in one second. This is calculated by multiplying the total texture units by the core speed of the chip. The higher the texel rate, the better the card will be at texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels applied in a second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels the graphics card could possibly record to the local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is calculated by multiplying the number of colour ROPs by the the core 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 fill rate also depends on quite a few other factors, especially the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the ability to reach the maximum fill rate.