GeForce GTX 470 vs GeForce GTX 560

Intro

The GeForce GTX 470 has a core clock frequency of 607 MHz and a GDDR5 memory speed of 837 MHz. It also makes use of a 320-bit bus, and makes use of a 40 nm design. It features 448 SPUs, 56 Texture Address Units, and 40 ROPs.

Compare all that to the GeForce GTX 560, which comes with GPU clock speed of 810 MHz, and 1024 MB of GDDR5 RAM set to run at 1001 MHz through a 256-bit bus. It also is made up of 336 Stream Processors, 56 Texture Address Units, and 32 ROPs.

Price Comparison

Specifications

Memory Bandwidth: Memory bandwidth is the maximum amount of data (counted in megabytes per second) that can be transported over the external memory interface in one second. The number is calculated by multiplying the interface width by the speed of its memory. If the card has DDR type memory, it should be multiplied by 2 once again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The better the bandwidth is, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, HDR and high 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 this number, the better the graphics card will be at texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels processed per second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum amount of pixels the video card could possibly write to the local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is worked out by multiplying the amount of ROPs by the the card's clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - aka Render Output Units) are responsible for drawing the pixels (image) on the screen. The actual pixel 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 potential to reach the maximum fill rate.