GeForce GTX 470 vs Radeon HD 4730

Intro

Compare those specs to the Radeon HD 4730, which makes use of a 55 nm design. AMD has set the core speed at 700 MHz. The GDDR5 RAM is set to run at a speed of 900 MHz on this particular model. It features 640(128x5) SPUs as well as 32 TAUs and 8 Rasterization Operator Units.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon HD 4730		140 Watts
GeForce GTX 470		215 Watts
	Difference: 75 Watts (54%)

Memory Bandwidth

In theory, the GeForce GTX 470 should perform quite a bit faster than the Radeon HD 4730 overall. (explain)

GeForce GTX 470		133920 MB/sec
Radeon HD 4730		57600 MB/sec
	Difference: 76320 (133%)

Texel Rate

The GeForce GTX 470 is much (about 52%) faster with regards to texture filtering than the Radeon HD 4730. (explain)

GeForce GTX 470		33992 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 4730		22400 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 11592 (52%)

Pixel Rate

If running with a high resolution is important to you, then the GeForce GTX 470 is the winner, and very much so. (explain)

GeForce GTX 470		24280 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 4730		5600 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 18680 (334%)

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 largest amount of data (measured in megabytes per second) that can be moved across the external memory interface in one second. It's worked out by multiplying the interface width by its memory speed. In the case of DDR type memory, the result should be multiplied by 2 once again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The better the card's memory bandwidth, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, HDR and higher screen resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum texture map elements (texels) that can be processed per second. This is calculated by multiplying the total texture units of the card 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 in a second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels the video card could possibly write to its local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is worked out by multiplying the amount of ROPs by the clock speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - sometimes also referred to as Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel fill rate also depends on lots of other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to reach the maximum fill rate.