GeForce GTX 460 (OEM) vs GeForce GTX 470

Intro

Compare those specifications to the GeForce GTX 470, which comes with core speeds of 607 MHz on the GPU, and 837 MHz on the 1280 MB of GDDR5 RAM. It features 448 SPUs as well as 56 Texture Address Units and 40 Rasterization Operator Units.

(No game benchmarks for this combination yet.)

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

Performance-wise, the GeForce GTX 470 should in theory be quite a bit better 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 small 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 running with a high screen resolution is important to you, then the GeForce GTX 470 is superior to the GeForce GTX 460 (OEM), but not by far. (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 (in units of megabytes per second) that can be moved past the external memory interface in a second. It's calculated by multiplying the bus width by its memory speed. If the card has DDR RAM, it must be multiplied by 2 again. If 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 higher screen resolutions.

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

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum amount of pixels that the graphics chip could possibly record to its local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is calculated by multiplying the number of ROPs by the the core speed of the card. 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 is also dependant on quite a few other factors, especially the memory bandwidth - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to reach the maximum fill rate.