GeForce GTX 465 vs Radeon HD 4870 X2

Intro

Compare those specs to the Radeon HD 4870 X2, which uses a 55 nm design. AMD has set the core frequency at 750 MHz. The GDDR5 RAM works at a frequency of 900 MHz on this particular model. It features 800(160x5) SPUs as well as 40 Texture Address Units and 16 Rasterization Operator Units.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce GTX 465		200 Watts
Radeon HD 4870 X2		350 Watts
	Difference: 150 Watts (75%)

Memory Bandwidth

In theory, the Radeon HD 4870 X2 is 125% faster than the GeForce GTX 465 overall, due to its higher bandwidth. (explain)

Radeon HD 4870 X2		230400 MB/sec
GeForce GTX 465		102592 MB/sec
	Difference: 127808 (125%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 4870 X2 is quite a bit (more or less 125%) more effective at anisotropic filtering than the GeForce GTX 465. (explain)

Radeon HD 4870 X2		60000 Mtexels/sec
GeForce GTX 465		26708 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 33292 (125%)

Pixel Rate

If using a high resolution is important to you, then the Radeon HD 4870 X2 is a better choice, by a large margin. (explain)

Radeon HD 4870 X2		24000 Mpixels/sec
GeForce GTX 465		19424 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 4576 (24%)

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: Bandwidth is the largest amount of information (in units of MB per second) that can be moved past the external memory interface in one second. The number is calculated by multiplying the card's bus width by the speed of its memory. If it uses DDR type RAM, it should be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher the bandwidth is, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, High Dynamic Range 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 worked out by multiplying the total texture units of the card 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 processed in a second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum amount of pixels that the graphics card could possibly record to the local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is worked out by multiplying the amount of ROPs by the the core clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - sometimes also referred to as Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel output rate is also dependant on quite a few other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the ability to reach the max fill rate.