GeForce GTX 560 Ti vs Radeon HD 4870 X2

Intro

Compare all that to the Radeon HD 4870 X2, which comes with GPU core speed of 750 MHz, and 1024 MB of GDDR5 memory running at 900 MHz through a 256-bit bus. It also is made up of 800(160x5) SPUs, 40 Texture Address Units, and 16 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce GTX 560 Ti		170 Watts
Radeon HD 4870 X2		350 Watts
	Difference: 180 Watts (106%)

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically, the Radeon HD 4870 X2 should perform quite a bit faster than the GeForce GTX 560 Ti overall. (explain)

Radeon HD 4870 X2		230400 MB/sec
GeForce GTX 560 Ti		128256 MB/sec
	Difference: 102144 (80%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 4870 X2 is a little bit (about 14%) more effective at anisotropic filtering than the GeForce GTX 560 Ti. (explain)

Radeon HD 4870 X2		60000 Mtexels/sec
GeForce GTX 560 Ti		52608 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 7392 (14%)

Pixel Rate

The GeForce GTX 560 Ti will be a small bit (more or less 10%) better at FSAA than the Radeon HD 4870 X2, and should be capable of handling higher resolutions while still performing well. (explain)

GeForce GTX 560 Ti		26304 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 4870 X2		24000 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 2304 (10%)

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.

One or more cards in this comparison are multi-core. This means that their bandwidth, texel and pixel rates are theoretically doubled - this does not mean the card will actually perform twice as fast, but only that it should in theory be able to. Actual game benchmarks will give a more accurate idea of what it's capable of.

Price Comparison

Specifications

Memory Bandwidth: Bandwidth is the maximum amount of data (counted in megabytes per second) that can be transferred across the external memory interface in a second. The number is calculated by multiplying the bus width by its memory clock speed. If it uses DDR type memory, the result should be multiplied by 2 once again. If DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The better the card's memory bandwidth, 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 is worked out by multiplying the total amount of texture units 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 in one second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum number of pixels that the graphics chip can possibly write to the local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is calculated by multiplying the number of colour ROPs by the the core speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also called Render Output Units) are responsible for drawing the pixels (image) on the screen. The actual pixel output rate is also dependant on many other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the ability to get to the maximum fill rate.