Geforce GTX 770 vs Radeon HD 4870 512MB

Intro

Compare those specifications to the Radeon HD 4870 512MB, which has core speeds of 750 MHz on the GPU, and 900 MHz on the 512 MB of GDDR5 memory. It features 800(160x5) SPUs as well as 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 770		230 Watts
	Difference: 80 Watts (53%)

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically speaking, the Geforce GTX 770 should be quite a bit faster than the Radeon HD 4870 512MB overall. (explain)

Geforce GTX 770		224384 MB/sec
Radeon HD 4870 512MB		115200 MB/sec
	Difference: 109184 (95%)

Texel Rate

The Geforce GTX 770 will be a lot (approximately 346%) faster with regards to anisotropic filtering than the Radeon HD 4870 512MB. (explain)

Geforce GTX 770		133888 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 4870 512MB		30000 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 103888 (346%)

Pixel Rate

If using lots of anti-aliasing is important to you, then the Geforce GTX 770 is the winner, by far. (explain)

Geforce GTX 770		33472 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 4870 512MB		12000 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 21472 (179%)

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 information (in units of MB per second) that can be moved across the external memory interface in one second. The number is worked out by multiplying the card's bus width by its memory clock speed. If it uses DDR memory, the result should be multiplied by 2 once again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher the card's memory bandwidth, the better 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 number of texture map elements (texels) that are applied in one second. This is calculated by multiplying the total 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 applied in one second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum amount of pixels that the graphics card can possibly write to the local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is calculated by multiplying the amount of Raster Operations Pipelines by the the card's clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - aka Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel rate is also dependant on quite a few other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the ability to get to the max fill rate.