GeForce GTX 660 Ti vs Radeon HD 4870 2GB

Intro

Compare all of that to the Radeon HD 4870 2GB, which comes with a core clock speed of 750 MHz and a GDDR5 memory speed of 900 MHz. It also makes use of a 256-bit memory bus, and makes use of a 55 nm design. It features 800(160x5) SPUs, 40 TAUs, and 16 Raster Operation Units.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Both cards have the same power consumption.

Memory Bandwidth

The GeForce GTX 660 Ti should theoretically perform much faster than the Radeon HD 4870 2GB overall. (explain)

GeForce GTX 660 Ti		144000 MB/sec
Radeon HD 4870 2GB		115200 MB/sec
	Difference: 28800 (25%)

Texel Rate

The GeForce GTX 660 Ti will be much (about 242%) more effective at anisotropic filtering than the Radeon HD 4870 2GB. (explain)

GeForce GTX 660 Ti		102480 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 4870 2GB		30000 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 72480 (242%)

Pixel Rate

The GeForce GTX 660 Ti will be quite a bit (approximately 83%) more effective at anti-aliasing than the Radeon HD 4870 2GB, and also capable of handling higher resolutions better. (explain)

GeForce GTX 660 Ti		21960 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 4870 2GB		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: Memory bandwidth is the maximum amount of data (in units of MB per second) that can be transferred across the external memory interface in one second. It's worked out by multiplying the card's bus width by its memory clock speed. If it uses DDR type RAM, the result should be multiplied by 2 again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher the memory bandwidth, 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 amount of texture map elements (texels) that are processed in one second. This number is worked out by multiplying the total number of texture units of the card by the core clock speed of the chip. The better this number, the better the video card will be at handling 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 card could possibly write to the local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is calculated by multiplying the number of ROPs by the the core clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - aka Render Output Units) are responsible for drawing the pixels (image) on the screen. The actual pixel fill rate also depends on many other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to reach the maximum fill rate.