GeForce GTX 280 vs Radeon HD 4870 1GB

Intro

Compare all that to the Radeon HD 4870 1GB, which has clock speeds of 750 MHz on the GPU, and 900 MHz on the 1024 MB of GDDR5 memory. It features 800(160x5) SPUs along with 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 1GB		150 Watts
GeForce GTX 280		236 Watts
	Difference: 86 Watts (57%)

Memory Bandwidth

In theory, the GeForce GTX 280 will be 23% quicker than the Radeon HD 4870 1GB in general, because of its higher data rate. (explain)

GeForce GTX 280		141696 MB/sec
Radeon HD 4870 1GB		115200 MB/sec
	Difference: 26496 (23%)

Texel Rate

The GeForce GTX 280 will be a lot (approximately 61%) faster with regards to AF than the Radeon HD 4870 1GB. (explain)

GeForce GTX 280		48160 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 4870 1GB		30000 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 18160 (61%)

Pixel Rate

The GeForce GTX 280 is quite a bit (more or less 61%) more effective at full screen anti-aliasing than the Radeon HD 4870 1GB, and also capable of handling higher screen resolutions without slowing down too much. (explain)

GeForce GTX 280		19264 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 4870 1GB		12000 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 7264 (61%)

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: Bandwidth is the maximum amount of data (counted in MB per second) that can be transferred past the external memory interface in a second. The number is worked out by multiplying the card's bus width by the speed of its memory. If it uses DDR type RAM, it must be multiplied by 2 again. If DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The higher the card's memory bandwidth, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, High Dynamic Range and higher screen resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum texture map elements (texels) that are processed in one second. This figure is worked out 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 video card will be at handling texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels per second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels the video card can possibly record to its local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is calculated by multiplying the amount of Render Output Units by the the card's clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - sometimes also referred to as Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel rate also depends on many other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the ability to get to the max fill rate.