GeForce GTX 480 vs Radeon HD 4770

Intro

Compare those specifications to the Radeon HD 4770, which uses a 40 nm design. AMD has clocked the core frequency at 750 MHz. The GDDR5 RAM runs at a speed of 800 MHz on this card. It features 640(128x5) SPUs along with 32 Texture Address Units and 16 Rasterization Operator Units.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon HD 4770		80 Watts
GeForce GTX 480		250 Watts
	Difference: 170 Watts (213%)

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically, the GeForce GTX 480 should be quite a bit faster than the Radeon HD 4770 in general. (explain)

GeForce GTX 480		177408 MB/sec
Radeon HD 4770		51200 MB/sec
	Difference: 126208 (247%)

Texel Rate

The GeForce GTX 480 should be much (about 75%) more effective at anisotropic filtering than the Radeon HD 4770. (explain)

GeForce GTX 480		42000 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 4770		24000 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 18000 (75%)

Pixel Rate

If running with high levels of AA is important to you, then the GeForce GTX 480 is superior to the Radeon HD 4770, and very much so. (explain)

GeForce GTX 480		33600 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 4770		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 largest amount of information (in units of MB per second) that can be transported across the external memory interface within a second. The number is worked out by multiplying the card's interface width by the speed of its memory. If it uses DDR memory, the result 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, High Dynamic Range and high resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum texture map elements (texels) that can be processed in one second. This figure is worked out by multiplying the total number of texture units of the card by the core speed of the chip. The higher this number, the better the graphics 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 number of pixels the video card can possibly record to the local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is calculated by multiplying the amount of ROPs 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 is also dependant on lots of other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the ability to get to the maximum fill rate.