GeForce GTX 960M vs Radeon HD 4870 2GB

Intro

Compare those specs to the Radeon HD 4870 2GB, which features GPU core speed of 750 MHz, and 2048 MB of GDDR5 memory running at 900 MHz through a 256-bit bus. It also features 800(160x5) SPUs, 40 TAUs, and 16 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce GTX 960M		65 Watts
Radeon HD 4870 2GB		150 Watts
	Difference: 85 Watts (131%)

Memory Bandwidth

The Radeon HD 4870 2GB, in theory, should perform a lot faster than the GeForce GTX 960M overall. (explain)

Radeon HD 4870 2GB		115200 MB/sec
GeForce GTX 960M		64000 MB/sec
	Difference: 51200 (80%)

Texel Rate

The GeForce GTX 960M will be much (more or less 46%) more effective at anisotropic filtering than the Radeon HD 4870 2GB. (explain)

GeForce GTX 960M		43840 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 4870 2GB		30000 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 13840 (46%)

Pixel Rate

If using a high screen resolution is important to you, then the GeForce GTX 960M is superior to the Radeon HD 4870 2GB, and very much so. (explain)

GeForce GTX 960M		17536 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 4870 2GB		12000 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 5536 (46%)

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 information (in units of MB per second) that can be moved across the external memory interface in one second. It is calculated by multiplying the bus width by its memory clock speed. If the card has DDR type RAM, it should be multiplied by 2 once again. If DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The higher the bandwidth is, the faster 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 processed per second. This number is worked out by multiplying the total amount of texture units by the core clock speed of the chip. The higher the texel rate, the better the card will be at handling texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels applied per second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels the graphics card can possibly write to the local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is calculated by multiplying the number of Raster Operations Pipelines by the the core speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also sometimes called Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel output 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 get to the max fill rate.