GeForce GTX 295 vs Radeon HD 4870 512MB

Intro

The GeForce GTX 295 uses a 55 nm design. nVidia has clocked the core frequency at 576 MHz. The GDDR3 memory runs at a speed of 999 MHz on this specific card. It features 240 SPUs along with 80 Texture Address Units and 28 Rasterization Operator Units.

Compare those specifications to the Radeon HD 4870 512MB, which makes use of a 55 nm design. ATi 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 Rasterization Operator 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 295 Amazon.com Other US-based stores Amazon.co.uk Amazon.de Amazon.fr

Radeon HD 4870 512MB Amazon.com Other US-based stores Amazon.co.uk Amazon.de Amazon.fr

Specifications

Model	GeForce GTX 295	Radeon HD 4870 512MB
Manufacturer	nVidia	ATi
Year	January 8, 2009	Jun 25, 2008
Code Name	G200b	RV770 XT
Fab Process	55 nm	55 nm
Bus	PCIe x16 2.0	PCIe 2.0 x16
Memory	896 MB (x2)	512 MB
Core Speed	576 MHz (x2)	750 MHz
Shader Speed	1242 MHz (x2)	(N/A) MHz
Memory Speed	999 MHz (x2)	900 MHz
Unified Shaders	240 (x2)	800(160x5)
Texture Mapping Units	80 (x2)	40
Render Output Units	28 (x2)	16
Bus Type	GDDR3	GDDR5
Bus Width	448-bit (x2)	256-bit
DirectX Version	DirectX 10	DirectX 10.1
OpenGL Version	OpenGL 3.1	OpenGL 3.0
Power (Max TDP)	289 watts	150 watts
Shader Model	4.0	4.1
Bandwidth	223776 MB/sec	115200 MB/sec
Texel Rate	92160 Mtexels/sec	30000 Mtexels/sec
Pixel Rate	32256 Mpixels/sec	12000 Mpixels/sec

Memory Bandwidth: Memory bandwidth is the max amount of information (in units of MB per second) that can be moved past the external memory interface within a second. It's worked out by multiplying the card's bus width by its memory clock speed. If it uses DDR RAM, it should be multiplied by 2 once again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher the card's memory bandwidth, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, HDR and high resolutions.

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

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels the graphics card can possibly write to the local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is worked out by multiplying the number of ROPs by the clock speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - aka Render Output Units) are responsible for drawing the pixels (image) on the screen. The actual pixel fill rate also depends on many other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the potential to reach the maximum fill rate.