GeForce GTX 480 vs Radeon HD 4870 2GB

Intro

Compare those specs to the Radeon HD 4870 2GB, which comes with GPU clock speed of 750 MHz, and 2048 MB of GDDR5 RAM set to run at 900 MHz through a 256-bit bus. It also features 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 2GB		150 Watts
GeForce GTX 480		250 Watts
	Difference: 100 Watts (67%)

Memory Bandwidth

In theory, the GeForce GTX 480 is 54% faster than the Radeon HD 4870 2GB overall, because of its higher data rate. (explain)

GeForce GTX 480		177408 MB/sec
Radeon HD 4870 2GB		115200 MB/sec
	Difference: 62208 (54%)

Texel Rate

The GeForce GTX 480 will be much (about 40%) more effective at texture filtering than the Radeon HD 4870 2GB. (explain)

GeForce GTX 480		42000 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 4870 2GB		30000 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 12000 (40%)

Pixel Rate

The GeForce GTX 480 will be quite a bit (approximately 180%) faster with regards to full screen anti-aliasing than the Radeon HD 4870 2GB, and will be able to handle higher screen resolutions without losing too much performance. (explain)

GeForce GTX 480		33600 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 4870 2GB		12000 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 21600 (180%)

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 max amount of information (measured in MB per second) that can be moved over the external memory interface in a second. It's worked out by multiplying the interface width by its memory speed. If the card has DDR RAM, the result should be multiplied by 2 once again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher the card's memory bandwidth, 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 texture map elements (texels) that can be processed per second. This figure is calculated by multiplying the total number of texture units of the card by the core clock speed of the chip. The better the texel rate, the better the video card will be at handling texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels processed in one second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum amount of pixels the video card could possibly write to the local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is calculated by multiplying the number of Render Output Units by the clock speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also sometimes called Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel rate also depends on many other factors, especially the memory bandwidth - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the ability to get to the maximum fill rate.