GeForce GTX 660 Ti vs Radeon HD 4870 512MB

Intro

Compare all that to the Radeon HD 4870 512MB, which uses a 55 nm design. AMD has set the core frequency at 750 MHz. The GDDR5 memory is set to run at a speed of 900 MHz on this card. It features 800(160x5) SPUs as well as 40 Texture Address Units and 16 Rasterization Operator Units.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Both cards have the same power consumption.

Memory Bandwidth

In theory, the GeForce GTX 660 Ti should be 25% quicker than the Radeon HD 4870 512MB in general, because of its higher bandwidth. (explain)

GeForce GTX 660 Ti		144000 MB/sec
Radeon HD 4870 512MB		115200 MB/sec
	Difference: 28800 (25%)

Texel Rate

The GeForce GTX 660 Ti is a lot (about 242%) more effective at AF than the Radeon HD 4870 512MB. (explain)

GeForce GTX 660 Ti		102480 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 4870 512MB		30000 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 72480 (242%)

Pixel Rate

If using a high resolution is important to you, then the GeForce GTX 660 Ti is superior to the Radeon HD 4870 512MB, by far. (explain)

GeForce GTX 660 Ti		21960 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 4870 512MB		12000 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 9960 (83%)

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 data (in units of MB per second) that can be transported across the external memory interface within a second. It's calculated by multiplying the card's bus width by its memory speed. If the card has DDR RAM, the result should be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The better the memory bandwidth, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, High Dynamic Range and high resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum texture map elements (texels) that are processed per second. This figure is worked out by multiplying the total 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 handling texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels in a second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum amount of pixels that the graphics card can possibly write to the local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is calculated by multiplying the number of ROPs by the the core speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also called Render Output Units) are responsible for drawing the pixels (image) on the screen. The actual pixel output rate also depends on quite a few other factors, especially the memory bandwidth - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to reach the max fill rate.