GeForce GTX 970M vs Radeon HD 4870 X2

Intro

Compare that to the Radeon HD 4870 X2, which makes use of a 55 nm design. AMD has clocked the core speed at 750 MHz. The GDDR5 memory works at a frequency of 900 MHz on this specific card. It features 800(160x5) SPUs as well as 40 Texture Address Units and 16 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce GTX 970M		75 Watts
Radeon HD 4870 X2		350 Watts
	Difference: 275 Watts (367%)

Memory Bandwidth

As far as performance goes, the Radeon HD 4870 X2 should theoretically be much superior to the GeForce GTX 970M overall. (explain)

Radeon HD 4870 X2		230400 MB/sec
GeForce GTX 970M		96000 MB/sec
	Difference: 134400 (140%)

Texel Rate

The GeForce GTX 970M is much (about 23%) better at AF than the Radeon HD 4870 X2. (explain)

GeForce GTX 970M		73920 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 4870 X2		60000 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 13920 (23%)

Pixel Rate

The GeForce GTX 970M is a lot (more or less 85%) better at anti-aliasing than the Radeon HD 4870 X2, and also should be able to handle higher resolutions more effectively. (explain)

GeForce GTX 970M		44352 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 4870 X2		24000 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 20352 (85%)

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 largest amount of data (measured in MB per second) that can be transported past the external memory interface in one second. It's calculated by multiplying the interface width by the speed of its memory. If the card has DDR type RAM, it should be multiplied by 2 again. If DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The better 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 number of texture map elements (texels) that are applied in one second. This number is worked out by multiplying the total amount of texture units by the core speed of the chip. The higher the texel rate, the better the video card will be at handling texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels processed per second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels that the graphics card could possibly write to its local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is worked out by multiplying the number 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 output rate also depends on lots of other factors, especially the memory bandwidth - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to reach the maximum fill rate.