GeForce GTX 960 vs Radeon HD 4870 1GB

Intro

Compare all that to the Radeon HD 4870 1GB, which has core clock speeds of 750 MHz on the GPU, and 900 MHz on the 1024 MB of GDDR5 RAM. It features 800(160x5) SPUs as well as 40 TAUs and 16 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce GTX 960		120 Watts
Radeon HD 4870 1GB		150 Watts
	Difference: 30 Watts (25%)

Memory Bandwidth

In theory, the Radeon HD 4870 1GB should perform a little bit faster than the GeForce GTX 960 in general. (explain)

Radeon HD 4870 1GB		115200 MB/sec
GeForce GTX 960		112000 MB/sec
	Difference: 3200 (3%)

Texel Rate

The GeForce GTX 960 will be quite a bit (approximately 140%) better at anisotropic filtering than the Radeon HD 4870 1GB. (explain)

GeForce GTX 960		72128 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 4870 1GB		30000 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 42128 (140%)

Pixel Rate

The GeForce GTX 960 should be much (about 201%) more effective at FSAA than the Radeon HD 4870 1GB, and also able to handle higher resolutions while still performing well. (explain)

GeForce GTX 960		36064 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 4870 1GB		12000 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 24064 (201%)

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: Memory bandwidth is the max amount of data (in units of MB per second) that can be moved over the external memory interface in a second. It's worked out by multiplying the card's bus width by its memory speed. If the card has DDR type RAM, it should be multiplied by 2 again. If DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The higher the bandwidth is, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, High Dynamic Range and higher screen resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum number of texture map elements (texels) that can be processed per second. This is worked out by multiplying the total amount of texture units by the core clock speed of the chip. The higher this number, the better the 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 the graphics card can possibly record to its local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is calculated by multiplying the number of colour ROPs by the clock speed of the card. 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 rate also depends on quite a few other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to reach the maximum fill rate.