GeForce GTX 980 vs Radeon HD 4870 2GB

Intro

Compare those specs to the Radeon HD 4870 2GB, which comes with GPU clock speed of 750 MHz, and 2048 MB of GDDR5 memory set to run at 900 MHz through a 256-bit bus. It also is comprised of 800(160x5) SPUs, 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 2GB		150 Watts
GeForce GTX 980		165 Watts
	Difference: 15 Watts (10%)

Memory Bandwidth

In theory, the GeForce GTX 980 should be 94% quicker than the Radeon HD 4870 2GB in general, due to its higher data rate. (explain)

GeForce GTX 980		224000 MB/sec
Radeon HD 4870 2GB		115200 MB/sec
	Difference: 108800 (94%)

Texel Rate

The GeForce GTX 980 will be a lot (approximately 380%) better at texture filtering than the Radeon HD 4870 2GB. (explain)

GeForce GTX 980		144128 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 4870 2GB		30000 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 114128 (380%)

Pixel Rate

If using high levels of AA is important to you, then the GeForce GTX 980 is superior to the Radeon HD 4870 2GB, by a large margin. (explain)

GeForce GTX 980		72064 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 4870 2GB		12000 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 60064 (501%)

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: Memory bandwidth is the largest 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 interface width by the speed of its memory. In the case of DDR memory, the result should be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The higher the bandwidth is, the faster 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 number of texture map elements (texels) that can be applied per second. This number is worked out by multiplying the total texture units by the core clock speed of the chip. The better the texel rate, the better the video 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 most pixels that the graphics card could 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 ROPs by the the core clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - sometimes also referred to as Render Output Units) are responsible for filling the screen with pixels (the image). The actual pixel fill rate is also dependant on many other factors, especially the memory bandwidth - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the ability to get to the max fill rate.