GeForce GTX 260 vs GeForce GTX 470

Intro

The GeForce GTX 260 uses a 65 nm design. nVidia has set the core frequency at 576 MHz. The GDDR3 RAM works at a frequency of 999 MHz on this card. It features 192 SPUs along with 64 Texture Address Units and 28 Rasterization Operator Units.

Compare all of that to the GeForce GTX 470, which comes with clock speeds of 607 MHz on the GPU, and 837 MHz on the 1280 MB of GDDR5 memory. It features 448 SPUs along with 56 Texture Address Units and 40 Rasterization Operator Units.

Price Comparison

Please note that the price comparisons are based on search keywords, and might not be the exact same card listed on this page. We have no control over the accuracy of their search results.

GeForce GTX 260 Amazon.com Other US-based stores Amazon.co.uk Amazon.de Amazon.fr

GeForce GTX 470 Amazon.com Other US-based stores Amazon.co.uk Amazon.de Amazon.fr

Specifications

Model	GeForce GTX 260	GeForce GTX 470
Manufacturer	nVidia	nVidia
Year	June 16, 2008	March 2010
Code Name	G200	GF100
Fab Process	65 nm	40 nm
Bus	PCIe x16 2.0	PCIe x16
Memory	896 MB	1280 MB
Core Speed	576 MHz	607 MHz
Shader Speed	1242 MHz	1215 MHz
Memory Speed	999 MHz	837 MHz
Unified Shaders	192	448
Texture Mapping Units	64	56
Render Output Units	28	40
Bus Type	GDDR3	GDDR5
Bus Width	448-bit	320-bit
DirectX Version	DirectX 10	DirectX 11
OpenGL Version	OpenGL 3.1	OpenGL 4.1
Power (Max TDP)	182 watts	215 watts
Shader Model	4.0	5.0
Bandwidth	111888 MB/sec	133920 MB/sec
Texel Rate	36864 Mtexels/sec	33992 Mtexels/sec
Pixel Rate	16128 Mpixels/sec	24280 Mpixels/sec

Memory Bandwidth: Bandwidth is the maximum amount of information (in units of megabytes per second) that can be transported across the external memory interface in one second. The number is worked out by multiplying the card's bus width by the speed of its memory. If it uses DDR type RAM, it must be multiplied by 2 once again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher the memory bandwidth, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, High Dynamic Range and high resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum number of texture map elements (texels) that can be applied in one second. This number is calculated by multiplying the total number of texture units by the core clock speed of the chip. The better this number, the better the video 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 amount of pixels that the graphics chip can possibly record to the local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is calculated by multiplying the number of ROPs by the the core clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - aka Render Output Units) are responsible for drawing the pixels (image) on the screen. The actual pixel output rate also depends on many other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to reach the max fill rate.