GeForce GTX 570 vs Radeon HD 4870 1GB

Intro

Compare all that to the Radeon HD 4870 1GB, which has clock speeds of 750 MHz on the GPU, and 900 MHz on the 1024 MB of GDDR5 RAM. It features 800(160x5) SPUs along with 40 Texture Address Units and 16 Rasterization Operator Units.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon HD 4870 1GB		150 Watts
GeForce GTX 570		219 Watts
	Difference: 69 Watts (46%)

Memory Bandwidth

The GeForce GTX 570 should theoretically perform quite a bit faster than the Radeon HD 4870 1GB overall. (explain)

GeForce GTX 570		152000 MB/sec
Radeon HD 4870 1GB		115200 MB/sec
	Difference: 36800 (32%)

Texel Rate

The GeForce GTX 570 is much (approximately 46%) faster with regards to anisotropic filtering than the Radeon HD 4870 1GB. (explain)

GeForce GTX 570		43920 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 4870 1GB		30000 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 13920 (46%)

Pixel Rate

The GeForce GTX 570 should be a lot (more or less 144%) faster with regards to anti-aliasing than the Radeon HD 4870 1GB, and capable of handling higher resolutions more effectively. (explain)

GeForce GTX 570		29280 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 4870 1GB		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 max amount of data (measured in megabytes per second) that can be moved over the external memory interface within a second. It's calculated by multiplying the card's interface width by the speed of its memory. If it uses DDR type memory, 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 anti-aliasing, High Dynamic Range and higher screen resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum number of texture map elements (texels) that are processed in one second. This is calculated by multiplying the total amount of texture units of the card by the core clock speed of the chip. The higher the texel rate, the better the card will be at texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels applied per second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum amount of pixels the graphics card could possibly record to its local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is calculated by multiplying the amount of Render Output Units by the the core speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - sometimes also referred to as Render Output Units) are responsible for filling the screen with pixels (the image). The actual pixel rate is also dependant on quite a few other factors, especially the memory bandwidth - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to get to the max fill rate.