GeForce GTX 970 vs Radeon HD 4870 X2

Intro

Compare those specs to the Radeon HD 4870 X2, which comes with GPU clock speed of 750 MHz, and 1024 MB of GDDR5 RAM running at 900 MHz through a 256-bit bus. It also is made up of 800(160x5) Stream Processors, 40 Texture Address Units, and 16 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce GTX 970		145 Watts
Radeon HD 4870 X2		350 Watts
	Difference: 205 Watts (141%)

Memory Bandwidth

The Radeon HD 4870 X2 should in theory perform just a bit faster than the GeForce GTX 970 in general. (explain)

Radeon HD 4870 X2		230400 MB/sec
GeForce GTX 970		224000 MB/sec
	Difference: 6400 (3%)

Texel Rate

The GeForce GTX 970 should be a lot (more or less 82%) faster with regards to AF than the Radeon HD 4870 X2. (explain)

GeForce GTX 970		109200 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 4870 X2		60000 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 49200 (82%)

Pixel Rate

The GeForce GTX 970 will be much (more or less 180%) faster with regards to anti-aliasing than the Radeon HD 4870 X2, and also should be capable of handling higher resolutions better. (explain)

GeForce GTX 970		67200 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 4870 X2		24000 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 43200 (180%)

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.

One or more cards in this comparison are multi-core. This means that their bandwidth, texel and pixel rates are theoretically doubled - this does not mean the card will actually perform twice as fast, but only that it should in theory be able to. Actual game benchmarks will give a more accurate idea of what it's capable of.

Price Comparison

Specifications

Memory Bandwidth: Memory bandwidth is the maximum amount of data (in units of megabytes per second) that can be moved past the external memory interface in a second. The number is calculated by multiplying the card's interface width by its memory clock speed. If it uses DDR memory, the result should be multiplied by 2 once again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The better the memory bandwidth, 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 texture map elements (texels) that are applied per second. This number is worked out by multiplying the total number of texture units by the core speed of the chip. The higher the texel rate, the better the graphics card will be at texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels in one second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum number of pixels that the graphics chip could possibly write to its local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is worked out by multiplying the amount of colour ROPs by the clock speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also sometimes called 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, most notably the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the potential to get to the maximum fill rate.