GeForce GTX 880M vs Radeon HD 4870 X2

Intro

Compare those specs to the Radeon HD 4870 X2, which has a GPU core clock speed of 750 MHz, and 1024 MB of GDDR5 RAM set to run at 900 MHz through a 256-bit bus. It also is comprised of 800(160x5) SPUs, 40 Texture Address Units, and 16 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce GTX 880M		130 Watts
Radeon HD 4870 X2		350 Watts
	Difference: 220 Watts (169%)

Memory Bandwidth

The Radeon HD 4870 X2, in theory, should be much faster than the GeForce GTX 880M overall. (explain)

Radeon HD 4870 X2		230400 MB/sec
GeForce GTX 880M		128000 MB/sec
	Difference: 102400 (80%)

Texel Rate

The GeForce GTX 880M will be a lot (about 104%) better at anisotropic filtering than the Radeon HD 4870 X2. (explain)

GeForce GTX 880M		122112 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 4870 X2		60000 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 62112 (104%)

Pixel Rate

If using a high resolution is important to you, then the GeForce GTX 880M is the winner, by far. (explain)

GeForce GTX 880M		30528 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 4870 X2		24000 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 6528 (27%)

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.

One or more cards in this comparison are multi-core. This means that their bandwidth, texel and pixel rates are theoretically doubled - this does not mean the card will actually perform twice as fast, but only that it should in theory be able to. Actual game benchmarks will give a more accurate idea of what it's capable of.

Price Comparison

Specifications

Memory Bandwidth: Bandwidth is the largest amount of data (counted in MB per second) that can be transferred across the external memory interface within a second. It's worked out by multiplying the interface width by its memory clock speed. If the card has DDR RAM, the result should be multiplied by 2 once again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher 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 can be processed in one second. This number is worked out by multiplying the total amount of texture units by the core speed of the chip. The higher the texel rate, the better the video card will be at texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels processed per second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum amount of pixels the graphics card can possibly record to the local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is worked out by multiplying the amount of Raster Operations Pipelines by the clock speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - aka Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel fill rate also depends on many other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to reach the max fill rate.