GeForce GTX 960 vs Radeon HD 4870 X2

Intro

Compare all that to the Radeon HD 4870 X2, which has 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 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 960		120 Watts
Radeon HD 4870 X2		350 Watts
	Difference: 230 Watts (192%)

Memory Bandwidth

Performance-wise, the Radeon HD 4870 X2 should in theory be a lot superior to the GeForce GTX 960 in general. (explain)

Radeon HD 4870 X2		230400 MB/sec
GeForce GTX 960		112000 MB/sec
	Difference: 118400 (106%)

Texel Rate

The GeForce GTX 960 will be a bit (about 20%) more effective at anisotropic filtering than the Radeon HD 4870 X2. (explain)

GeForce GTX 960		72128 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 4870 X2		60000 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 12128 (20%)

Pixel Rate

If using high levels of AA is important to you, then the GeForce GTX 960 is a better choice, by a large margin. (explain)

GeForce GTX 960		36064 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 4870 X2		24000 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 12064 (50%)

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 largest amount of information (in units of megabytes per second) that can be transferred past the external memory interface within a second. It's worked out by multiplying the card's interface width by its memory speed. In the case of DDR memory, the result should be multiplied by 2 once again. If DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The better the 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 number of texture map elements (texels) that can be applied in one second. This figure is calculated by multiplying the total amount of texture units of the card by the core speed of the chip. The higher the texel rate, the better the video card will be at texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels per second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum number of pixels the graphics card can possibly record to the local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is calculated by multiplying the number of colour ROPs by the the core clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also called Render Output Units) are responsible for filling the screen with pixels (the image). 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 ability to reach the max fill rate.