GeForce GTX 460 (OEM) vs GeForce GTX 470

Intro

Compare all that to the GeForce GTX 470, which uses a 40 nm design. nVidia has clocked the core speed at 607 MHz. The GDDR5 RAM is set to run at a speed of 837 MHz on this particular card. It features 448 SPUs along with 56 Texture Address Units and 40 ROPs.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce GTX 460 (OEM)		150 Watts
GeForce GTX 470		215 Watts
	Difference: 65 Watts (43%)

Memory Bandwidth

The GeForce GTX 470 should theoretically be much faster than the GeForce GTX 460 (OEM) overall. (explain)

GeForce GTX 470		133920 MB/sec
GeForce GTX 460 (OEM)		108800 MB/sec
	Difference: 25120 (23%)

Texel Rate

The GeForce GTX 460 (OEM) should be a bit (approximately 7%) better at AF than the GeForce GTX 470. (explain)

GeForce GTX 460 (OEM)		36400 Mtexels/sec
GeForce GTX 470		33992 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 2408 (7%)

Pixel Rate

If using a high resolution is important to you, then the GeForce GTX 470 is superior to the GeForce GTX 460 (OEM), not by a very large margin though. (explain)

GeForce GTX 470		24280 Mpixels/sec
GeForce GTX 460 (OEM)		20800 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 3480 (17%)

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: Memory bandwidth is the max amount of information (measured in megabytes per second) that can be transported across the external memory interface within a second. The number is worked out by multiplying the card's bus width by its memory speed. In the case of DDR type memory, it must be multiplied by 2 once again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The better the memory bandwidth, the faster 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 texture map elements (texels) that are processed in one second. This figure is calculated by multiplying the total number of texture units by the core clock speed of the chip. The higher the texel rate, the better the card will be at texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels applied per second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels the graphics card can possibly write to the local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is calculated by multiplying the number of colour ROPs by the the core clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - sometimes also referred to as Render Output Units) are responsible for drawing the pixels (image) on the screen. The actual pixel rate also depends 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 maximum fill rate.