GeForce GT 440 3GB vs Radeon HD 4870 X2

Intro

Compare all that to the Radeon HD 4870 X2, which comes with core clock speeds of 750 MHz on the GPU, and 900 MHz on the 1024 MB of GDDR5 memory. It features 800(160x5) SPUs along with 40 TAUs and 16 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce GT 440 3GB		56 Watts
Radeon HD 4870 X2		350 Watts
	Difference: 294 Watts (525%)

Memory Bandwidth

In theory, the Radeon HD 4870 X2 should be much faster than the GeForce GT 440 3GB overall. (explain)

Radeon HD 4870 X2		230400 MB/sec
GeForce GT 440 3GB		43200 MB/sec
	Difference: 187200 (433%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 4870 X2 will be quite a bit (approximately 321%) more effective at anisotropic filtering than the GeForce GT 440 3GB. (explain)

Radeon HD 4870 X2		60000 Mtexels/sec
GeForce GT 440 3GB		14256 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 45744 (321%)

Pixel Rate

If running with high levels of AA is important to you, then the Radeon HD 4870 X2 is a better choice, and very much so. (explain)

Radeon HD 4870 X2		24000 Mpixels/sec
GeForce GT 440 3GB		14256 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 9744 (68%)

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 maximum amount of information (counted in MB per second) that can be transported over the external memory interface within a second. It's calculated by multiplying the card's bus width by its memory clock speed. If it uses DDR type memory, the result should be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The better the bandwidth is, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, HDR and high resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum texture map elements (texels) that are processed per second. This is calculated by multiplying the total number of texture units of the card by the core speed of the chip. The better this number, the better the graphics 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 in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is worked out 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 drawing the pixels (image) on the screen. The actual pixel rate also depends on quite a few other factors, especially the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the ability to get to the max fill rate.