GeForce GTX 570 vs Radeon HD 4870 512MB

Intro

Compare all of that to the Radeon HD 4870 512MB, which has clock speeds of 750 MHz on the GPU, and 900 MHz on the 512 MB of GDDR5 memory. It features 800(160x5) SPUs along with 40 Texture Address Units and 16 Rasterization Operator Units.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon HD 4870 512MB		150 Watts
GeForce GTX 570		219 Watts
	Difference: 69 Watts (46%)

Memory Bandwidth

Performance-wise, the GeForce GTX 570 should in theory be a lot superior to the Radeon HD 4870 512MB overall. (explain)

GeForce GTX 570		152000 MB/sec
Radeon HD 4870 512MB		115200 MB/sec
	Difference: 36800 (32%)

Texel Rate

The GeForce GTX 570 is a lot (more or less 46%) more effective at anisotropic filtering than the Radeon HD 4870 512MB. (explain)

GeForce GTX 570		43920 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 4870 512MB		30000 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 13920 (46%)

Pixel Rate

The GeForce GTX 570 will be quite a bit (approximately 144%) faster with regards to anti-aliasing than the Radeon HD 4870 512MB, and will be able to handle higher resolutions without losing too much performance. (explain)

GeForce GTX 570		29280 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 4870 512MB		12000 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 17280 (144%)

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 maximum amount of information (measured in megabytes per second) that can be moved past the external memory interface in one second. The number is calculated by multiplying the card's interface width by its memory clock speed. If the card has DDR type RAM, the result should be multiplied by 2 once again. If DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The better the bandwidth is, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, HDR and high resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum texture map elements (texels) that are processed per second. This number 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 card will be at handling texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels in a second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum amount of pixels that the graphics chip could possibly write to its local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is calculated by multiplying the number of colour ROPs by the the core speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - aka Render Output Units) are responsible for filling the screen with pixels (the image). The actual pixel output rate also depends on quite a few other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the ability to get to the maximum fill rate.