GeForce GT 450 (OEM) vs Radeon HD 4870 X2

Intro

Compare all that to the Radeon HD 4870 X2, which uses a 55 nm design. AMD has clocked the core frequency at 750 MHz. The GDDR5 RAM is set to run at a frequency of 900 MHz on this particular card. It features 800(160x5) SPUs as well as 40 Texture Address Units and 16 Rasterization Operator Units.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce GT 450 (OEM)		106 Watts
Radeon HD 4870 X2		350 Watts
	Difference: 244 Watts (230%)

Memory Bandwidth

As far as performance goes, the Radeon HD 4870 X2 should in theory be a lot better than the GeForce GT 450 (OEM) in general. (explain)

Radeon HD 4870 X2		230400 MB/sec
GeForce GT 450 (OEM)		96000 MB/sec
	Difference: 134400 (140%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 4870 X2 will be quite a bit (more or less 216%) faster with regards to texture filtering than the GeForce GT 450 (OEM). (explain)

Radeon HD 4870 X2		60000 Mtexels/sec
GeForce GT 450 (OEM)		18960 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 41040 (216%)

Pixel Rate

If running with high levels of AA is important to you, then the Radeon HD 4870 X2 is a better choice, and very much so. (explain)

Radeon HD 4870 X2		24000 Mpixels/sec
GeForce GT 450 (OEM)		18960 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 5040 (27%)

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 max amount of data (in units of megabytes per second) that can be transported across the external memory interface in a second. It is 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 again. If DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The better the memory bandwidth, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, HDR and high 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 amount of texture units by the core clock speed of the chip. The higher this number, the better the video card will be at texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels applied per second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum number of pixels the video card can possibly write to its local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is calculated by multiplying the amount of ROPs by the the core clock speed. 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 quite a few other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the ability to get to the max fill rate.