GeForce GTX 560 vs Radeon HD 4870 512MB

Intro

Compare those specifications to the Radeon HD 4870 512MB, which uses a 55 nm design. AMD has clocked the core speed at 750 MHz. The GDDR5 RAM is set to run at a frequency of 900 MHz on this particular model. It features 800(160x5) SPUs as well as 40 TAUs and 16 Rasterization Operator Units.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Both cards have the same power consumption.

Memory Bandwidth

In theory, the GeForce GTX 560 is 11% faster than the Radeon HD 4870 512MB overall, because of its higher data rate. (explain)

GeForce GTX 560		128128 MB/sec
Radeon HD 4870 512MB		115200 MB/sec
	Difference: 12928 (11%)

Texel Rate

The GeForce GTX 560 will be quite a bit (more or less 51%) better at anisotropic filtering than the Radeon HD 4870 512MB. (explain)

GeForce GTX 560		45360 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 4870 512MB		30000 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 15360 (51%)

Pixel Rate

The GeForce GTX 560 should be a lot (more or less 116%) more effective at FSAA than the Radeon HD 4870 512MB, and should be capable of handling higher resolutions without slowing down too much. (explain)

GeForce GTX 560		25920 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 4870 512MB		12000 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 13920 (116%)

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 megabytes per second) that can be transported across the external memory interface in one second. It is calculated by multiplying the card's bus width by its memory clock speed. If it uses DDR memory, it should be multiplied by 2 again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher the card's memory bandwidth, 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 amount of texture map elements (texels) that are applied in one second. This figure 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 video card will be at handling texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels processed per second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels the graphics card could possibly record to the local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is calculated by multiplying the amount of Render Output Units by the the core clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also sometimes called Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel fill rate also depends on many other factors, especially the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the ability to get to the maximum fill rate.