GeForce GT 320 vs Radeon HD 4870 X2

Intro

Compare those specifications to the Radeon HD 4870 X2, which has GPU 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 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

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce GT 320		43 Watts
Radeon HD 4870 X2		350 Watts
	Difference: 307 Watts (714%)

Memory Bandwidth

As far as performance goes, the Radeon HD 4870 X2 should in theory be much superior to the GeForce GT 320 in general. (explain)

Radeon HD 4870 X2		230400 MB/sec
GeForce GT 320		25280 MB/sec
	Difference: 205120 (811%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 4870 X2 should be quite a bit (approximately 363%) more effective at anisotropic filtering than the GeForce GT 320. (explain)

Radeon HD 4870 X2		60000 Mtexels/sec
GeForce GT 320		12960 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 47040 (363%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon HD 4870 X2 is much (about 456%) faster with regards to anti-aliasing than the GeForce GT 320, and should be able to handle higher screen resolutions better. (explain)

Radeon HD 4870 X2		24000 Mpixels/sec
GeForce GT 320		4320 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 19680 (456%)

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 (measured in megabytes per second) that can be transferred across the external memory interface in one second. The number is calculated by multiplying the card's 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 card's memory bandwidth, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, High Dynamic Range and higher screen resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum number of texture map elements (texels) that can be applied in one second. This is calculated by multiplying the total number of texture units of the card by the core speed of the chip. The higher this number, the better the video card will be at handling 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 that the graphics card could possibly write to its local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is calculated by multiplying the amount of ROPs by the clock speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - sometimes also referred to as Render Output Units) are responsible for filling the screen with pixels (the image). 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.