GeForce GTX 660 Ti vs Radeon HD 4870 512MB

Intro

Compare that to the Radeon HD 4870 512MB, which comes with GPU clock speed of 750 MHz, and 512 MB of GDDR5 memory running at 900 MHz through a 256-bit bus. It also is made up of 800(160x5) SPUs, 40 Texture Address Units, and 16 Raster Operation Units.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Both cards have the same power consumption.

Memory Bandwidth

As far as performance goes, the GeForce GTX 660 Ti should theoretically be a lot superior to the Radeon HD 4870 512MB in general. (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 will be much (about 242%) better 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 running with high levels of AA is important to you, then the GeForce GTX 660 Ti is the winner, and very much so. (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 (counted in MB per second) that can be moved across the external memory interface within a second. It is worked out by multiplying the card's interface width by the speed of its memory. If it uses DDR type RAM, it must be multiplied by 2 once again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The higher the memory bandwidth, the better 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 can be processed in one second. This is worked out 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 graphics card will be at texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels in one second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels the graphics card can possibly write to the local memory per 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 - sometimes also referred to as Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel output rate also depends on many other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the ability to get to the maximum fill rate.