GeForce GTX 460 (OEM) vs Radeon HD 4870 512MB

Intro

Compare those specs to the Radeon HD 4870 512MB, which comes with clock speeds of 750 MHz on the GPU, and 900 MHz on the 512 MB of GDDR5 memory. It features 800(160x5) SPUs along with 40 Texture Address Units and 16 Rasterization Operator Units.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Both cards have the same power consumption.

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically speaking, the Radeon HD 4870 512MB is 6% faster than the GeForce GTX 460 (OEM) in general, due to its greater data rate. (explain)

Radeon HD 4870 512MB		115200 MB/sec
GeForce GTX 460 (OEM)		108800 MB/sec
	Difference: 6400 (6%)

Texel Rate

The GeForce GTX 460 (OEM) should be much (more or less 21%) more effective at texture filtering than the Radeon HD 4870 512MB. (explain)

GeForce GTX 460 (OEM)		36400 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 4870 512MB		30000 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 6400 (21%)

Pixel Rate

The GeForce GTX 460 (OEM) will be a lot (approximately 73%) better at AA than the Radeon HD 4870 512MB, and should be capable of handling higher resolutions without slowing down too much. (explain)

GeForce GTX 460 (OEM)		20800 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 4870 512MB		12000 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 8800 (73%)

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 max amount of data (in units of MB per second) that can be moved past the external memory interface in a second. The number is worked out by multiplying the card's bus width by the speed of its memory. In the case of DDR type RAM, the result should be multiplied by 2 once again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The better the bandwidth is, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, HDR and high resolutions.

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

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels that the graphics chip could possibly record to the local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is calculated by multiplying the number of Raster Operations Pipelines by the the core speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also called Render Output Units) are responsible for drawing the pixels (image) on the screen. The actual pixel fill rate is also dependant on many other factors, especially the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the ability to get to the maximum fill rate.