GeForce GTS 450 vs Radeon HD 4870 X2

Intro

Compare those specs to the Radeon HD 4870 X2, which features a GPU core clock speed of 750 MHz, and 1024 MB of GDDR5 RAM set to run at 900 MHz through a 256-bit bus. It also is comprised of 800(160x5) SPUs, 40 Texture Address Units, and 16 ROPs.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

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

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically speaking, the Radeon HD 4870 X2 should perform quite a bit faster than the GeForce GTS 450 overall. (explain)

Radeon HD 4870 X2		230400 MB/sec
GeForce GTS 450		57728 MB/sec
	Difference: 172672 (299%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 4870 X2 should be quite a bit (about 139%) faster with regards to AF than the GeForce GTS 450. (explain)

Radeon HD 4870 X2		60000 Mtexels/sec
GeForce GTS 450		25056 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 34944 (139%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon HD 4870 X2 is quite a bit (more or less 92%) more effective at FSAA than the GeForce GTS 450, and will be capable of handling higher screen resolutions while still performing well. (explain)

Radeon HD 4870 X2		24000 Mpixels/sec
GeForce GTS 450		12528 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 11472 (92%)

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 largest amount of data (in units of MB per second) that can be transported over the external memory interface in a second. The number is calculated by multiplying the card's interface width by its memory speed. In the case of DDR type RAM, it must be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The better the card's memory bandwidth, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, High Dynamic Range and higher screen resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum texture map elements (texels) that are applied in one 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 video card will be at handling texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels per second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum amount of pixels that the graphics chip could possibly record to its local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is calculated by multiplying the amount of ROPs by the the card's 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 also depends on many other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the potential to get to the maximum fill rate.