GeForce GTX 660 Ti vs Radeon HD 4870 512MB

Intro

Compare all that to the Radeon HD 4870 512MB, which features core clock speeds of 750 MHz on the GPU, and 900 MHz on the 512 MB of GDDR5 RAM. It features 800(160x5) SPUs along with 40 Texture Address Units and 16 ROPs.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Both cards have the same power consumption.

Memory Bandwidth

In theory, the GeForce GTX 660 Ti should be 25% quicker than the Radeon HD 4870 512MB overall, because of its higher data rate. (explain)

GeForce GTX 660 Ti		144000 MB/sec
Radeon HD 4870 512MB		115200 MB/sec
	Difference: 28800 (25%)

Texel Rate

The GeForce GTX 660 Ti is a lot (about 242%) more effective at AF than the Radeon HD 4870 512MB. (explain)

GeForce GTX 660 Ti		102480 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 4870 512MB		30000 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 72480 (242%)

Pixel Rate

If running with a high screen resolution is important to you, then the GeForce GTX 660 Ti is a better choice, by far. (explain)

GeForce GTX 660 Ti		21960 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 4870 512MB		12000 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 9960 (83%)

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 information (counted in MB per second) that can be moved across the external memory interface in a second. It is worked out by multiplying the card's interface width by the speed of its memory. If the card has DDR RAM, it should be multiplied by 2 again. If DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The higher the memory bandwidth, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, HDR and higher screen resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum amount of texture map elements (texels) that are applied in one second. This number is calculated by multiplying the total texture units by the core clock 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 applied per second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum number of pixels that the graphics chip could possibly write to its local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is calculated by multiplying the amount of ROPs by the clock speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - sometimes also referred to as Render Output Units) are responsible for filling the screen with pixels (the image). The actual pixel rate is also dependant on quite a few 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.