GeForce GTX 970 vs Radeon HD 4870 X2

Intro

Compare that to the Radeon HD 4870 X2, which comes with core clock speeds of 750 MHz on the GPU, and 900 MHz on the 1024 MB of GDDR5 RAM. It features 800(160x5) SPUs as well as 40 TAUs and 16 Rasterization Operator Units.

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 be a little bit faster than the GeForce GTX 970 overall. (explain)

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

Texel Rate

The GeForce GTX 970 is much (more or less 82%) better at anisotropic filtering 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

If using a high resolution is important to you, then the GeForce GTX 970 is a better choice, and very much so. (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: Bandwidth is the maximum amount of data (measured in megabytes per second) that can be transferred over the external memory interface within a second. The number is calculated by multiplying the card's interface width by its memory clock speed. If the card has DDR RAM, the result should be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher 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 number is worked out by multiplying the total number of texture units by the core clock speed of the chip. The higher this number, the better the card will be at handling texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels applied in a second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum number of pixels that the graphics chip can possibly record to its local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is calculated by multiplying the amount of ROPs by the clock speed of the card. 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 output rate is also dependant on lots of other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the potential to reach the maximum fill rate.