GeForce GTX 660 Ti vs Radeon HD 4870 X2

Intro

Compare those specifications to the Radeon HD 4870 X2, which makes use of a 55 nm design. AMD has set the core speed at 750 MHz. The GDDR5 RAM is set to run at a speed of 900 MHz on this particular card. It features 800(160x5) SPUs as well as 40 TAUs and 16 Rasterization Operator Units.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce GTX 660 Ti		150 Watts
Radeon HD 4870 X2		350 Watts
	Difference: 200 Watts (133%)

Memory Bandwidth

Performance-wise, the Radeon HD 4870 X2 should in theory be much superior to the GeForce GTX 660 Ti in general. (explain)

Radeon HD 4870 X2		230400 MB/sec
GeForce GTX 660 Ti		144000 MB/sec
	Difference: 86400 (60%)

Texel Rate

The GeForce GTX 660 Ti is quite a bit (approximately 71%) faster with regards to anisotropic filtering than the Radeon HD 4870 X2. (explain)

GeForce GTX 660 Ti		102480 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 4870 X2		60000 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 42480 (71%)

Pixel Rate

If running with lots of anti-aliasing is important to you, then the Radeon HD 4870 X2 is the winner, but only just. (explain)

Radeon HD 4870 X2		24000 Mpixels/sec
GeForce GTX 660 Ti		21960 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 2040 (9%)

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 largest amount of information (in units of MB per second) that can be transported past the external memory interface within a second. The number is worked out by multiplying the card's interface width by the speed of its memory. If the card has DDR type memory, the result should be multiplied by 2 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, High Dynamic Range and high resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum texture map elements (texels) that can be processed in one second. This figure is calculated by multiplying the total texture units of the card by the core 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 number of pixels that the graphics card can possibly record to the local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is worked out by multiplying the number of Render Output Units by the the core speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also called Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel output rate is also dependant on quite a few other factors, especially the memory bandwidth - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the potential to reach the max fill rate.