GeForce GTX 275 vs Radeon HD 4870 X2

Intro

Compare all that to the Radeon HD 4870 X2, which comes with GPU clock speed of 750 MHz, and 1024 MB of GDDR5 RAM running at 900 MHz through a 256-bit bus. It also features 800(160x5) Stream Processors, 40 TAUs, and 16 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce GTX 275		219 Watts
Radeon HD 4870 X2		350 Watts
	Difference: 131 Watts (60%)

Memory Bandwidth

Performance-wise, the Radeon HD 4870 X2 should in theory be a lot superior to the GeForce GTX 275 overall. (explain)

Radeon HD 4870 X2		230400 MB/sec
GeForce GTX 275		127008 MB/sec
	Difference: 103392 (81%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 4870 X2 is a small bit (approximately 18%) more effective at anisotropic filtering than the GeForce GTX 275. (explain)

Radeon HD 4870 X2		60000 Mtexels/sec
GeForce GTX 275		50640 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 9360 (18%)

Pixel Rate

If using a high screen resolution is important to you, then the Radeon HD 4870 X2 is the winner, by a large margin. (explain)

Radeon HD 4870 X2		24000 Mpixels/sec
GeForce GTX 275		17724 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 6276 (35%)

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 max amount of data (measured in MB per second) that can be moved over the external memory interface in one second. It is calculated by multiplying the card's interface width by the speed of its memory. In the case of DDR type RAM, the result should be multiplied by 2 again. If DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The better the bandwidth is, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, High Dynamic Range and higher screen resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum amount of texture map elements (texels) that are applied per second. This is worked out by multiplying the total number of texture units of the card by the core speed of the chip. The higher this number, 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 maximum amount of pixels the graphics card can possibly record to its local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is worked out by multiplying the number of Render Output Units 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 memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to get to the maximum fill rate.