GeForce GTX 260 216SP 55 nm vs Radeon HD 4870 X2

Intro

The GeForce GTX 260 216SP 55 nm has core speeds of 576 MHz on the GPU, and 999 MHz on the 896 MB of GDDR3 RAM. It features 216 SPUs along with 72 Texture Address Units and 28 Rasterization Operator Units.

Compare those specifications to the Radeon HD 4870 X2, which comes with a core clock frequency of 750 MHz and a GDDR5 memory speed of 900 MHz. It also uses a 256-bit memory bus, and makes use of a 55 nm design. It features 800(160x5) SPUs, 40 TAUs, and 16 Raster Operation Units.

Price Comparison

Please note that the price comparisons are based on search keywords, and might not be the exact same card listed on this page. We have no control over the accuracy of their search results.

GeForce GTX 260 216SP 55 nm Amazon.com Other US-based stores Amazon.co.uk Amazon.de Amazon.fr

Radeon HD 4870 X2 Amazon.com Other US-based stores Amazon.co.uk Amazon.de Amazon.fr

Specifications

Model	GeForce GTX 260 216SP 55 nm	Radeon HD 4870 X2
Manufacturer	nVidia	ATi
Year	December 22, 2008	Aug 12, 2008
Code Name	G200b	R700
Fab Process	55 nm	55 nm
Bus	PCIe x16 2.0	PCIe 2.0 x16 (PCIe bridge)
Memory	896 MB	1024 MB (x2)
Core Speed	576 MHz	750 MHz (x2)
Shader Speed	1242 MHz	(N/A) MHz (x2)
Memory Speed	999 MHz	900 MHz (x2)
Unified Shaders	216	800(160x5) (x2)
Texture Mapping Units	72	40 (x2)
Render Output Units	28	16 (x2)
Bus Type	GDDR3	GDDR5
Bus Width	448-bit	256-bit (x2)
DirectX Version	DirectX 10	DirectX 10.1
OpenGL Version	OpenGL 3.1	OpenGL 3.0
Power (Max TDP)	171 watts	350 watts
Shader Model	4.0	4.1
Bandwidth	111888 MB/sec	230400 MB/sec
Texel Rate	41472 Mtexels/sec	60000 Mtexels/sec
Pixel Rate	16128 Mpixels/sec	24000 Mpixels/sec

Memory Bandwidth: Memory bandwidth is the max amount of information (counted in megabytes per second) that can be moved past the external memory interface in one second. It's worked out by multiplying the card's bus width by its memory clock speed. If it uses DDR type memory, the result should be multiplied by 2 once again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher the bandwidth is, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, High Dynamic Range and high resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum texture map elements (texels) that are applied per second. This is calculated by multiplying the total texture units of the card by the core clock speed of the chip. The higher this number, the better the graphics card will be at handling texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels in one second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum number of pixels the video card can possibly record to its local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is calculated by multiplying the amount of Render Output Units by the clock speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - aka Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel output rate also depends on many other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the ability to reach the maximum fill rate.