GeForce GTX 660 Ti vs Radeon HD 4870 1GB

Intro

Compare that to the Radeon HD 4870 1GB, which makes use of a 55 nm design. AMD has clocked the core frequency at 750 MHz. The GDDR5 memory is set to run at a frequency of 900 MHz on this particular model. 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

The GeForce GTX 660 Ti should theoretically be quite a bit faster than the Radeon HD 4870 1GB overall. (explain)

GeForce GTX 660 Ti		144000 MB/sec
Radeon HD 4870 1GB		115200 MB/sec
	Difference: 28800 (25%)

Texel Rate

The GeForce GTX 660 Ti will be quite a bit (more or less 242%) faster with regards to AF than the Radeon HD 4870 1GB. (explain)

GeForce GTX 660 Ti		102480 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 4870 1GB		30000 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 72480 (242%)

Pixel Rate

The GeForce GTX 660 Ti should be a lot (approximately 83%) faster with regards to AA than the Radeon HD 4870 1GB, and should be able to handle higher resolutions while still performing well. (explain)

GeForce GTX 660 Ti		21960 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 4870 1GB		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 largest amount of data (counted in megabytes per second) that can be transferred past the external memory interface in a second. The number is worked out by multiplying the bus width by the speed of its memory. If the card has DDR RAM, it must be multiplied by 2 again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The better the memory bandwidth, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, HDR and high resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum amount of texture map elements (texels) that can be processed in one second. This figure is calculated by multiplying the total number of texture units by the core 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 that the graphics card could possibly record to the local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is worked out by multiplying the number 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 output rate is also dependant on quite a few other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the potential to get to the maximum fill rate.