GeForce GTX 560 vs Radeon HD 4870 2GB

Intro

Compare those specs to the Radeon HD 4870 2GB, which makes use of a 55 nm design. AMD has set the core speed at 750 MHz. The GDDR5 RAM runs at a speed of 900 MHz on this specific model. It features 800(160x5) SPUs as well as 40 Texture Address Units and 16 ROPs.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Both cards have the same power consumption.

Memory Bandwidth

The GeForce GTX 560 should theoretically perform just a bit faster than the Radeon HD 4870 2GB in general. (explain)

GeForce GTX 560		128128 MB/sec
Radeon HD 4870 2GB		115200 MB/sec
	Difference: 12928 (11%)

Texel Rate

The GeForce GTX 560 will be quite a bit (more or less 51%) faster with regards to anisotropic filtering than the Radeon HD 4870 2GB. (explain)

GeForce GTX 560		45360 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 4870 2GB		30000 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 15360 (51%)

Pixel Rate

If using lots of anti-aliasing is important to you, then the GeForce GTX 560 is superior to the Radeon HD 4870 2GB, and very much so. (explain)

GeForce GTX 560		25920 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 4870 2GB		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: Bandwidth is the largest amount of information (measured in MB per second) that can be transferred across the external memory interface in a second. It's calculated by multiplying the card's bus width by its memory clock speed. If the card has DDR memory, it must be multiplied by 2 once again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The better the bandwidth is, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, HDR and higher screen resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum texture map elements (texels) that are processed per 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 higher this number, the better the video card will be at texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels processed in one second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum amount of pixels that the graphics card can possibly record to the local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is calculated by multiplying the number of ROPs by the clock 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 is also dependant on quite a few other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the ability to get to the maximum fill rate.