GeForce GTX 660 Ti vs Radeon HD 4870 1GB

Intro

Compare those specifications to the Radeon HD 4870 1GB, which uses a 55 nm design. AMD has clocked the core frequency at 750 MHz. The GDDR5 RAM 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

In theory, the GeForce GTX 660 Ti should perform much 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 a lot (more or less 242%) faster with regards to anisotropic filtering 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 is quite a bit (approximately 83%) faster with regards to FSAA than the Radeon HD 4870 1GB, and will be capable of handling higher resolutions more effectively. (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 information (measured in MB per second) that can be transported across the external memory interface in a second. It's worked out by multiplying the card's bus width by its memory speed. If the card has DDR type RAM, it should be multiplied by 2 once again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher the bandwidth is, 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 number of texture map elements (texels) that are applied in one second. This is calculated by multiplying the total number of texture units of the card by the core speed of the chip. The higher the texel rate, the better the graphics card will be at handling texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels processed per second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum amount of pixels the video card could possibly write to the local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is worked out by multiplying the number of Raster Operations Pipelines by the the core speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - sometimes also referred to as Render Output Units) are responsible for drawing the pixels (image) on the screen. The actual pixel output rate also depends on lots of other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the ability to reach the max fill rate.