GeForce GTS 450 vs Radeon HD 4870 X2

Intro

Compare that to the Radeon HD 4870 X2, which has GPU clock speed of 750 MHz, and 1024 MB of GDDR5 memory running at 900 MHz through a 256-bit bus. It also features 800(160x5) Stream Processors, 40 Texture Address Units, and 16 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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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

In theory, the Radeon HD 4870 X2 is 299% faster than the GeForce GTS 450 overall, because of its greater bandwidth. (explain)

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

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 4870 X2 is a lot (more or less 139%) faster with regards to anisotropic filtering 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 should be much (approximately 92%) faster with regards to FSAA than the GeForce GTS 450, and also capable of handling higher screen resolutions without slowing down too much. (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 information (in units of megabytes per second) that can be moved across the external memory interface in one second. It's worked out by multiplying the card's interface 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 ANOTHER 2x. The better the bandwidth is, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, HDR and higher screen resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum number of texture map elements (texels) that can be applied per second. This figure is calculated by multiplying the total texture units of the card by the core clock speed of the chip. The better the texel rate, the better the graphics card will be at handling texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels in a 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 - also sometimes called Render Output Units) are responsible for drawing the pixels (image) on the screen. The actual pixel output rate also depends on lots of other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the potential to reach the max fill rate.