GeForce GTX 470 vs Radeon HD 4870 1GB

Intro

Compare those specs to the Radeon HD 4870 1GB, which features GPU clock speed of 750 MHz, and 1024 MB of GDDR5 memory set to run at 900 MHz through a 256-bit bus. It also is made up of 800(160x5) Stream Processors, 40 Texture Address Units, and 16 Raster Operation Units.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon HD 4870 1GB		150 Watts
GeForce GTX 470		215 Watts
	Difference: 65 Watts (43%)

Memory Bandwidth

In theory, the GeForce GTX 470 should be 16% quicker than the Radeon HD 4870 1GB in general, due to its greater data rate. (explain)

GeForce GTX 470		133920 MB/sec
Radeon HD 4870 1GB		115200 MB/sec
	Difference: 18720 (16%)

Texel Rate

The GeForce GTX 470 should be a small bit (approximately 13%) better at AF than the Radeon HD 4870 1GB. (explain)

GeForce GTX 470		33992 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 4870 1GB		30000 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 3992 (13%)

Pixel Rate

The GeForce GTX 470 will be a lot (approximately 102%) more effective at AA than the Radeon HD 4870 1GB, and also should be able to handle higher screen resolutions without slowing down too much. (explain)

GeForce GTX 470		24280 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 4870 1GB		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: Bandwidth is the maximum amount of data (counted in MB per second) that can be moved over the external memory interface within a second. It is worked out by multiplying the interface width by the speed of its memory. If it uses DDR memory, it must be multiplied by 2 again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The better the bandwidth is, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, High Dynamic Range and higher screen resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum amount of texture map elements (texels) that are applied per second. This is worked out by multiplying the total number of texture units by the core clock speed of the chip. The higher the texel rate, the better the video 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 maximum amount of pixels the graphics card could possibly write to the local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is calculated by multiplying the amount 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 lots of other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to reach the maximum fill rate.