GeForce GTX 980 vs Radeon HD 4870 X2

Intro

Compare those specs to the Radeon HD 4870 X2, which features core 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 Rasterization Operator Units.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce GTX 980		165 Watts
Radeon HD 4870 X2		350 Watts
	Difference: 185 Watts (112%)

Memory Bandwidth

In theory, the Radeon HD 4870 X2 should be a small bit faster than the GeForce GTX 980 in general. (explain)

Radeon HD 4870 X2		230400 MB/sec
GeForce GTX 980		224000 MB/sec
	Difference: 6400 (3%)

Texel Rate

The GeForce GTX 980 will be a lot (more or less 140%) better at anisotropic filtering than the Radeon HD 4870 X2. (explain)

GeForce GTX 980		144128 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 4870 X2		60000 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 84128 (140%)

Pixel Rate

If using a high resolution is important to you, then the GeForce GTX 980 is a better choice, by a large margin. (explain)

GeForce GTX 980		72064 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 4870 X2		24000 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 48064 (200%)

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 transferred across the external memory interface in one second. It is calculated by multiplying the bus width by its memory speed. In the case of DDR type RAM, the result should be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher the card's memory bandwidth, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, High Dynamic Range and high resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum amount of texture map elements (texels) that can be applied in one second. This number is worked out by multiplying the total amount of texture units of the card by the core clock speed of the chip. The better the texel rate, the better the video card will be at texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels applied per second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels that the graphics card can possibly write to the local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is calculated 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 outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel rate is also dependant on lots of other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the potential to reach the maximum fill rate.