GeForce GTS 450 vs Radeon HD 4870 512MB

Intro

Compare all that to the Radeon HD 4870 512MB, which uses a 55 nm design. AMD has set the core frequency at 750 MHz. The GDDR5 memory works at a frequency of 900 MHz on this specific card. It features 800(160x5) SPUs along with 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 512MB		150 Watts
	Difference: 44 Watts (42%)

Memory Bandwidth

In theory, the Radeon HD 4870 512MB will be 100% quicker than the GeForce GTS 450 overall, because of its higher data rate. (explain)

Radeon HD 4870 512MB		115200 MB/sec
GeForce GTS 450		57728 MB/sec
	Difference: 57472 (100%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 4870 512MB is a little bit (more or less 20%) better at anisotropic filtering than the GeForce GTS 450. (explain)

Radeon HD 4870 512MB		30000 Mtexels/sec
GeForce GTS 450		25056 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 4944 (20%)

Pixel Rate

If using a high resolution is important to you, then the GeForce GTS 450 is the winner, though not by far. (explain)

GeForce GTS 450		12528 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 4870 512MB		12000 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 528 (4%)

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.

Price Comparison

Specifications

Memory Bandwidth: Bandwidth is the maximum amount of information (measured in MB per second) that can be moved over the external memory interface in a second. It's calculated by multiplying the card's interface width by its memory clock speed. In the case of DDR RAM, it must be multiplied by 2 once again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The higher the card's memory bandwidth, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, HDR and high resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum texture map elements (texels) that are applied in one second. This figure is worked out by multiplying the total amount of texture units of the card by the core 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 applied per second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum amount of pixels that the graphics card could possibly write to its local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is calculated by multiplying the amount of Render Output Units 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 rate also depends on quite a few other factors, especially the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to get to the max fill rate.