GeForce GTS 450 1GB vs GeForce GTX 470

Intro

Compare those specs 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 frequency of 837 MHz on this specific card. It features 448 SPUs along with 56 Texture Address Units and 40 Rasterization Operator Units.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce GTS 450 1GB		106 Watts
GeForce GTX 470		215 Watts
	Difference: 109 Watts (103%)

Memory Bandwidth

The GeForce GTX 470 should in theory perform much faster than the GeForce GTS 450 1GB overall. (explain)

GeForce GTX 470		133920 MB/sec
GeForce GTS 450 1GB		57728 MB/sec
	Difference: 76192 (132%)

Texel Rate

The GeForce GTX 470 will be a lot (approximately 36%) more effective at texture filtering than the GeForce GTS 450 1GB. (explain)

GeForce GTX 470		33992 Mtexels/sec
GeForce GTS 450 1GB		25056 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 8936 (36%)

Pixel Rate

If running with lots of anti-aliasing is important to you, then the GeForce GTX 470 is superior to the GeForce GTS 450 1GB, by a large margin. (explain)

GeForce GTX 470		24280 Mpixels/sec
GeForce GTS 450 1GB		12528 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 11752 (94%)

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 largest amount of data (counted in megabytes per second) that can be transferred over the external memory interface in a second. It is calculated by multiplying the card's bus width by its memory speed. In the case of DDR RAM, it should be multiplied by 2 once again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The better the memory bandwidth, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, HDR and higher screen resolutions.

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

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum number of pixels that the graphics card can possibly write to the local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is calculated by multiplying the amount of Raster Operations Pipelines 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 fill rate is also dependant on many other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the ability to get to the maximum fill rate.