GeForce 8800 Ultra vs Radeon HD 4870 X2

Intro

Compare those specs to the Radeon HD 4870 X2, which comes with core speeds of 750 MHz on the GPU, and 900 MHz on the 1024 MB of GDDR5 RAM. It features 800(160x5) SPUs along with 40 Texture Address Units and 16 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce 8800 Ultra		171 Watts
Radeon HD 4870 X2		350 Watts
	Difference: 179 Watts (105%)

Memory Bandwidth

Performance-wise, the Radeon HD 4870 X2 should theoretically be quite a bit superior to the GeForce 8800 Ultra in general. (explain)

Radeon HD 4870 X2		230400 MB/sec
GeForce 8800 Ultra		103680 MB/sec
	Difference: 126720 (122%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 4870 X2 will be quite a bit (about 53%) faster with regards to texture filtering than the GeForce 8800 Ultra. (explain)

Radeon HD 4870 X2		60000 Mtexels/sec
GeForce 8800 Ultra		39168 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 20832 (53%)

Pixel Rate

If running with lots of anti-aliasing is important to you, then the Radeon HD 4870 X2 is superior to the GeForce 8800 Ultra, and very much so. (explain)

Radeon HD 4870 X2		24000 Mpixels/sec
GeForce 8800 Ultra		14688 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 9312 (63%)

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 maximum amount of information (in units of megabytes per second) that can be transferred across the external memory interface in a second. The number is calculated by multiplying the card's bus width by its memory clock speed. If it uses DDR type RAM, it must be multiplied by 2 once again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The better the card's memory bandwidth, the faster 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 number is worked out by multiplying the total amount of texture units of the card by the core clock speed of the chip. The better the texel rate, the better the card will be at texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels processed in a second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum number of pixels the graphics card can 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 Render Output Units by the the card's clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - aka Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel output rate is also dependant on many other factors, especially the memory bandwidth - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the potential to get to the maximum fill rate.