GeForce GTS 450 vs Radeon HD 4870 X2

Intro

Compare all that to the Radeon HD 4870 X2, which features a clock speed of 750 MHz and a GDDR5 memory frequency of 900 MHz. It also uses a 256-bit memory bus, and uses a 55 nm design. It is made up of 800(160x5) SPUs, 40 TAUs, and 16 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce GTS 450		106 Watts
Radeon HD 4870 X2		350 Watts
	Difference: 244 Watts (230%)

Memory Bandwidth

The Radeon HD 4870 X2 should in theory perform a lot faster than the GeForce GTS 450 overall. (explain)

Radeon HD 4870 X2		230400 MB/sec
GeForce GTS 450		57728 MB/sec
	Difference: 172672 (299%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 4870 X2 should be a lot (about 139%) better at texture filtering than the GeForce GTS 450. (explain)

Radeon HD 4870 X2		60000 Mtexels/sec
GeForce GTS 450		25056 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 34944 (139%)

Pixel Rate

If running with a high screen resolution is important to you, then the Radeon HD 4870 X2 is a better choice, by far. (explain)

Radeon HD 4870 X2		24000 Mpixels/sec
GeForce GTS 450		12528 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 11472 (92%)

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 (measured in megabytes per second) that can be transported over the external memory interface within a second. The number is worked out by multiplying the card's bus width by its memory clock speed. In the case of DDR RAM, it must be multiplied by 2 again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher the card's memory bandwidth, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, High Dynamic Range and high resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum amount of texture map elements (texels) that are applied per second. This number is worked out by multiplying the total number of texture units of the card by the core clock speed of the chip. The higher the texel rate, the better the video card will be at handling texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels processed in one second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum amount of pixels that the graphics chip can possibly record to the local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is calculated by multiplying the number of ROPs by the clock 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 fill rate also depends on quite a few other factors, especially the memory bandwidth - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the potential to get to the maximum fill rate.