GeForce GT 440 3GB vs Radeon HD 4870 X2

Intro

Compare all 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 is set to run at a speed of 900 MHz on this specific card. It features 800(160x5) SPUs along with 40 Texture Address Units and 16 Rasterization Operator Units.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce GT 440 3GB		56 Watts
Radeon HD 4870 X2		350 Watts
	Difference: 294 Watts (525%)

Memory Bandwidth

As far as performance goes, the Radeon HD 4870 X2 should theoretically be a lot better than the GeForce GT 440 3GB in general. (explain)

Radeon HD 4870 X2		230400 MB/sec
GeForce GT 440 3GB		43200 MB/sec
	Difference: 187200 (433%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 4870 X2 is a lot (approximately 321%) faster with regards to anisotropic filtering than the GeForce GT 440 3GB. (explain)

Radeon HD 4870 X2		60000 Mtexels/sec
GeForce GT 440 3GB		14256 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 45744 (321%)

Pixel Rate

If using a high screen resolution is important to you, then the Radeon HD 4870 X2 is superior to the GeForce GT 440 3GB, and very much so. (explain)

Radeon HD 4870 X2		24000 Mpixels/sec
GeForce GT 440 3GB		14256 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 9744 (68%)

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 maximum amount of data (measured in megabytes per second) that can be moved over the external memory interface in a second. It is calculated by multiplying the bus width by its memory speed. If the card has DDR type RAM, it should be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher the memory bandwidth, 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 number of texture map elements (texels) that are processed in one second. This number is worked out by multiplying the total number of texture units of the card by the core clock speed of the chip. The better this number, the better the video card will be at handling texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels processed in one second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum amount of pixels that the graphics chip could possibly write to the local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is worked out by multiplying the number of Raster Operations Pipelines by the the core speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also called Render Output Units) are responsible for filling the screen with pixels (the image). The actual pixel output rate is also dependant on lots of other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the ability to reach the max fill rate.