GeForce GTX 465 vs Radeon HD 7870 XT

Intro

Compare those specifications to the Radeon HD 7870 XT, which has core speeds of 925 MHz on the GPU, and 1500 MHz on the 2048 MB of GDDR5 RAM. It features 1536 SPUs as well as 96 Texture Address Units and 32 Rasterization Operator Units.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon HD 7870 XT		185 Watts
GeForce GTX 465		200 Watts
	Difference: 15 Watts (8%)

Memory Bandwidth

As far as performance goes, the Radeon HD 7870 XT should theoretically be quite a bit better than the GeForce GTX 465 overall. (explain)

Radeon HD 7870 XT		192000 MB/sec
GeForce GTX 465		102592 MB/sec
	Difference: 89408 (87%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 7870 XT should be quite a bit (more or less 232%) more effective at anisotropic filtering than the GeForce GTX 465. (explain)

Radeon HD 7870 XT		88800 Mtexels/sec
GeForce GTX 465		26708 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 62092 (232%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon HD 7870 XT will be a lot (approximately 52%) better at AA than the GeForce GTX 465, and also will be able to handle higher screen resolutions better. (explain)

Radeon HD 7870 XT		29600 Mpixels/sec
GeForce GTX 465		19424 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 10176 (52%)

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 information (in units of megabytes per second) that can be transferred across the external memory interface within a second. It is worked out by multiplying the card's bus width by the speed of its memory. If it uses DDR type memory, the result should be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The better the bandwidth is, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, HDR and high resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum number of texture map elements (texels) that can be applied per second. This figure is calculated by multiplying the total texture units by the core speed of the chip. The better 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 in a second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum number of pixels the video card can possibly record to the local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is calculated by multiplying the number of ROPs by the the core speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also called Render Output Units) are responsible for drawing the pixels (image) on the screen. The actual pixel fill rate is also dependant on quite a few other factors, especially the memory bandwidth - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the ability to reach the max fill rate.