GeForce GTS 450 1GB vs Radeon HD 4770

Intro

Compare all that to the Radeon HD 4770, which comes with a GPU core clock speed of 750 MHz, and 512 MB of GDDR5 memory running at 800 MHz through a 128-bit bus. It also is made up of 640(128x5) Stream Processors, 32 Texture Address Units, and 16 Raster Operation Units.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon HD 4770		80 Watts
GeForce GTS 450 1GB		106 Watts
	Difference: 26 Watts (33%)

Memory Bandwidth

The GeForce GTS 450 1GB should theoretically perform a little bit faster than the Radeon HD 4770 in general. (explain)

GeForce GTS 450 1GB		57728 MB/sec
Radeon HD 4770		51200 MB/sec
	Difference: 6528 (13%)

Texel Rate

The GeForce GTS 450 1GB will be a small bit (more or less 4%) more effective at anisotropic filtering than the Radeon HD 4770. (explain)

GeForce GTS 450 1GB		25056 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 4770		24000 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 1056 (4%)

Pixel Rate

If running with a high screen resolution is important to you, then the GeForce GTS 450 1GB is a better choice, but it probably won't make a huge difference. (explain)

GeForce GTS 450 1GB		12528 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 4770		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 data (counted in MB per second) that can be transported past the external memory interface in one second. The number is calculated by multiplying the card's interface width by the speed of its memory. In the case of DDR RAM, the result should be multiplied by 2 once again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher the card's memory bandwidth, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, High Dynamic Range and high resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum amount of texture map elements (texels) that are processed per second. This figure is worked out by multiplying the total texture units by the core clock speed of the chip. The better this number, the better the card will be at texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels in one second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels the video card could possibly write to its local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is calculated by multiplying the amount of Render Output Units by the the core speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also sometimes called Render Output Units) are responsible for drawing the pixels (image) on the screen. The actual pixel rate is also dependant on many other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the ability to get to the max fill rate.