GeForce GTX 560 Ti vs Radeon HD 4870 1GB

Intro

Compare that to the Radeon HD 4870 1GB, which features clock speeds of 750 MHz on the GPU, and 900 MHz on the 1024 MB of GDDR5 memory. It features 800(160x5) SPUs as well as 40 Texture Address Units and 16 ROPs.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon HD 4870 1GB		150 Watts
GeForce GTX 560 Ti		170 Watts
	Difference: 20 Watts (13%)

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically speaking, the GeForce GTX 560 Ti should be 11% quicker than the Radeon HD 4870 1GB in general, due to its greater bandwidth. (explain)

GeForce GTX 560 Ti		128256 MB/sec
Radeon HD 4870 1GB		115200 MB/sec
	Difference: 13056 (11%)

Texel Rate

The GeForce GTX 560 Ti is a lot (about 75%) better at texture filtering than the Radeon HD 4870 1GB. (explain)

GeForce GTX 560 Ti		52608 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 4870 1GB		30000 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 22608 (75%)

Pixel Rate

The GeForce GTX 560 Ti will be much (about 119%) better at AA than the Radeon HD 4870 1GB, and also should be able to handle higher screen resolutions better. (explain)

GeForce GTX 560 Ti		26304 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 4870 1GB		12000 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 14304 (119%)

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: Memory bandwidth is the largest amount of information (in units of MB per second) that can be moved across the external memory interface within a second. It is calculated by multiplying the bus width by its memory speed. If it uses DDR RAM, it must be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher the bandwidth is, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, HDR and higher screen resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum number of texture map elements (texels) that are applied per 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 better the texel rate, 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 most pixels that the graphics chip can possibly write to the local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is calculated by multiplying the amount of Render Output Units by the the core speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also sometimes called Render Output Units) are responsible for drawing the pixels (image) on the screen. The actual pixel rate also depends on many other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the ability to get to the maximum fill rate.