Geforce GTX 690 vs Radeon HD 4870 512MB

Intro

Compare all that to the Radeon HD 4870 512MB, which comes with GPU clock speed of 750 MHz, and 512 MB of GDDR5 RAM set to run at 900 MHz through a 256-bit bus. It also is comprised of 800(160x5) Stream Processors, 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 512MB		150 Watts
Geforce GTX 690		300 Watts
	Difference: 150 Watts (100%)

Memory Bandwidth

The Geforce GTX 690 should in theory perform quite a bit faster than the Radeon HD 4870 512MB in general. (explain)

Geforce GTX 690		384512 MB/sec
Radeon HD 4870 512MB		115200 MB/sec
	Difference: 269312 (234%)

Texel Rate

The Geforce GTX 690 should be much (approximately 681%) more effective at texture filtering than the Radeon HD 4870 512MB. (explain)

Geforce GTX 690		234240 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 4870 512MB		30000 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 204240 (681%)

Pixel Rate

The Geforce GTX 690 is much (about 388%) more effective at FSAA than the Radeon HD 4870 512MB, and also able to handle higher screen resolutions better. (explain)

Geforce GTX 690		58560 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 4870 512MB		12000 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 46560 (388%)

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: Memory bandwidth is the maximum amount of information (counted in MB per second) that can be transferred past the external memory interface in a second. The number is calculated by multiplying the bus width by its memory speed. In the case of DDR RAM, the result should be multiplied by 2 once again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The better the memory bandwidth, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, High Dynamic Range and higher screen resolutions.

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

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels the graphics card could possibly record to its local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is calculated by multiplying the amount of Raster Operations Pipelines by the clock speed of the card. 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 is also dependant on quite a few other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the potential to get to the max fill rate.