GeForce GTX 470 vs Radeon HD 4870 2GB

Intro

Compare all of that to the Radeon HD 4870 2GB, which features core clock speeds of 750 MHz on the GPU, and 900 MHz on the 2048 MB of GDDR5 memory. It features 800(160x5) SPUs as well as 40 Texture Address Units and 16 ROPs.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon HD 4870 2GB		150 Watts
GeForce GTX 470		215 Watts
	Difference: 65 Watts (43%)

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically, the GeForce GTX 470 should perform a small bit faster than the Radeon HD 4870 2GB in general. (explain)

GeForce GTX 470		133920 MB/sec
Radeon HD 4870 2GB		115200 MB/sec
	Difference: 18720 (16%)

Texel Rate

The GeForce GTX 470 is a bit (more or less 13%) better at anisotropic filtering than the Radeon HD 4870 2GB. (explain)

GeForce GTX 470		33992 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 4870 2GB		30000 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 3992 (13%)

Pixel Rate

The GeForce GTX 470 will be a lot (more or less 102%) more effective at anti-aliasing than the Radeon HD 4870 2GB, and also should be capable of handling higher resolutions without losing too much performance. (explain)

GeForce GTX 470		24280 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 4870 2GB		12000 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 12280 (102%)

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 MB per second) that can be transported past the external memory interface in one second. The number is calculated by multiplying the card's bus width by its memory clock speed. If it uses DDR RAM, it should be multiplied by 2 once again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The better the bandwidth is, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, HDR and high resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum texture map elements (texels) that are processed per second. This figure is calculated by multiplying the total number of texture units of the card by the core 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 per second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum amount of pixels that the graphics card could possibly record to its local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is worked out by multiplying the number of Render Output Units by the the core clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also called Render Output Units) are responsible for filling the screen with pixels (the image). The actual pixel rate also depends on lots of other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the ability to get to the max fill rate.