GeForce GTS 450 vs Radeon HD 4870 2GB

Intro

Compare all of that to the Radeon HD 4870 2GB, which makes use of a 55 nm design. AMD has clocked the core speed at 750 MHz. The GDDR5 RAM works at a frequency of 900 MHz on this specific model. It features 800(160x5) SPUs as well as 40 TAUs and 16 Rasterization Operator Units.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce GTS 450		106 Watts
Radeon HD 4870 2GB		150 Watts
	Difference: 44 Watts (42%)

Memory Bandwidth

The Radeon HD 4870 2GB, in theory, should perform much faster than the GeForce GTS 450 overall. (explain)

Radeon HD 4870 2GB		115200 MB/sec
GeForce GTS 450		57728 MB/sec
	Difference: 57472 (100%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 4870 2GB is a small bit (approximately 20%) faster with regards to texture filtering than the GeForce GTS 450. (explain)

Radeon HD 4870 2GB		30000 Mtexels/sec
GeForce GTS 450		25056 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 4944 (20%)

Pixel Rate

If using a high screen resolution is important to you, then the GeForce GTS 450 is a better choice, but not by far. (explain)

GeForce GTS 450		12528 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 4870 2GB		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 largest amount of information (in units of megabytes per second) that can be moved across the external memory interface in a second. It is calculated by multiplying the card's interface width by the speed of its memory. If it uses DDR memory, it must be multiplied by 2 once again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher the memory bandwidth, the faster 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 number of texture units by the core clock speed of the chip. The better this number, the better the 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 most pixels that the graphics chip could possibly write to the local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is calculated by multiplying the number of Render Output Units by the clock speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also sometimes called Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel output rate also depends on many other factors, especially the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to get to the maximum fill rate.