Geforce GTX 770 vs Radeon HD 4870 1GB

Intro

Compare those specifications to the Radeon HD 4870 1GB, which comes with a clock frequency of 750 MHz and a GDDR5 memory frequency of 900 MHz. It also features a 256-bit memory bus, and uses a 55 nm design. It is made up of 800(160x5) SPUs, 40 TAUs, and 16 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon HD 4870 1GB		150 Watts
Geforce GTX 770		230 Watts
	Difference: 80 Watts (53%)

Memory Bandwidth

Performance-wise, the Geforce GTX 770 should theoretically be a lot better than the Radeon HD 4870 1GB in general. (explain)

Geforce GTX 770		224384 MB/sec
Radeon HD 4870 1GB		115200 MB/sec
	Difference: 109184 (95%)

Texel Rate

The Geforce GTX 770 should be much (more or less 346%) faster with regards to texture filtering than the Radeon HD 4870 1GB. (explain)

Geforce GTX 770		133888 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 4870 1GB		30000 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 103888 (346%)

Pixel Rate

If using a high resolution is important to you, then the Geforce GTX 770 is superior to the Radeon HD 4870 1GB, by a large margin. (explain)

Geforce GTX 770		33472 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 4870 1GB		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 largest amount of information (in units of megabytes per second) that can be transferred across the external memory interface in one second. It's worked out by multiplying the bus width by the speed of its memory. If it uses DDR type RAM, the result should be multiplied by 2 once again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The higher the card's memory bandwidth, the better 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 per second. This figure is worked out by multiplying the total number of texture units by the core speed of the chip. The better the texel rate, 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 the graphics card can possibly write to its local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is calculated by multiplying the number of Render Output Units by the clock speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - aka Render Output Units) are responsible for drawing the pixels (image) on the screen. The actual pixel output rate also depends on quite a few other factors, especially the memory bandwidth - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the ability to get to the maximum fill rate.