GeForce 8800 Ultra vs Radeon HD 4870 2GB

Intro

Compare those specifications to the Radeon HD 4870 2GB, which comes with core speeds of 750 MHz on the GPU, and 900 MHz on the 2048 MB of GDDR5 memory. It features 800(160x5) SPUs as well as 40 Texture Address Units and 16 Rasterization Operator Units.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon HD 4870 2GB		150 Watts
GeForce 8800 Ultra		171 Watts
	Difference: 21 Watts (14%)

Memory Bandwidth

In theory, the Radeon HD 4870 2GB should be a little bit faster than the GeForce 8800 Ultra overall. (explain)

Radeon HD 4870 2GB		115200 MB/sec
GeForce 8800 Ultra		103680 MB/sec
	Difference: 11520 (11%)

Texel Rate

The GeForce 8800 Ultra will be quite a bit (about 31%) better at AF than the Radeon HD 4870 2GB. (explain)

GeForce 8800 Ultra		39168 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 4870 2GB		30000 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 9168 (31%)

Pixel Rate

The GeForce 8800 Ultra is much (approximately 22%) more effective at FSAA than the Radeon HD 4870 2GB, and will be able to handle higher screen resolutions more effectively. (explain)

GeForce 8800 Ultra		14688 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 4870 2GB		12000 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 2688 (22%)

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 (measured in MB per second) that can be moved over the external memory interface in a second. It is worked out by multiplying the bus width by the speed of its memory. In the case of DDR type memory, it must be multiplied by 2 once again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The better the memory bandwidth, 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 are processed in one second. This figure is calculated 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 texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels in a second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels that the graphics chip could possibly write to its local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is worked out by multiplying the amount of Raster Operations Pipelines by the the core 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 is also dependant on quite a few other factors, especially the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the ability to get to the max fill rate.