Geforce GTX 690 vs Radeon HD 4870 X2

Intro

Compare all that to the Radeon HD 4870 X2, which has core clock speeds of 750 MHz on the GPU, and 900 MHz on the 1024 MB of GDDR5 memory. It features 800(160x5) SPUs along with 40 Texture Address Units and 16 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Geforce GTX 690		300 Watts
Radeon HD 4870 X2		350 Watts
	Difference: 50 Watts (17%)

Memory Bandwidth

The Geforce GTX 690 should theoretically perform quite a bit faster than the Radeon HD 4870 X2 in general. (explain)

Geforce GTX 690		384512 MB/sec
Radeon HD 4870 X2		230400 MB/sec
	Difference: 154112 (67%)

Texel Rate

The Geforce GTX 690 should be much (more or less 290%) better at texture filtering than the Radeon HD 4870 X2. (explain)

Geforce GTX 690		234240 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 4870 X2		60000 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 174240 (290%)

Pixel Rate

If using lots of anti-aliasing is important to you, then the Geforce GTX 690 is the winner, by far. (explain)

Geforce GTX 690		58560 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 4870 X2		24000 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 34560 (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.

One or more cards in this comparison are multi-core. This means that their bandwidth, texel and pixel rates are theoretically doubled - this does not mean the card will actually perform twice as fast, but only that it should in theory be able to. Actual game benchmarks will give a more accurate idea of what it's capable of.

Price Comparison

Specifications

Memory Bandwidth: Bandwidth is the maximum amount of data (in units of megabytes per second) that can be transferred over the external memory interface in one second. The number is worked out by multiplying the interface width by its memory clock speed. If the card has DDR memory, it should be multiplied by 2 again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher the card's memory bandwidth, the better 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 can be applied per second. This number is worked out by multiplying the total amount of texture units of the card by the core clock speed of the chip. The better the texel rate, the better the graphics card will be at texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels applied in one second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels that the graphics card can possibly write to its local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is worked out by multiplying the amount of colour ROPs by the the card's clock speed. 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 output rate is also dependant on many other factors, especially the memory bandwidth - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the ability to get to the max fill rate.