GeForce GTX 460 (OEM) vs Radeon HD 4870 512MB

Intro

Compare that to the Radeon HD 4870 512MB, which has a clock speed of 750 MHz and a GDDR5 memory speed of 900 MHz. It also features a 256-bit memory bus, and uses a 55 nm design. It features 800(160x5) SPUs, 40 TAUs, and 16 ROPs.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Both cards have the same power consumption.

Memory Bandwidth

The Radeon HD 4870 512MB should in theory perform just a bit faster than the GeForce GTX 460 (OEM) overall. (explain)

Radeon HD 4870 512MB		115200 MB/sec
GeForce GTX 460 (OEM)		108800 MB/sec
	Difference: 6400 (6%)

Texel Rate

The GeForce GTX 460 (OEM) should be quite a bit (approximately 21%) faster with regards to anisotropic filtering than the Radeon HD 4870 512MB. (explain)

GeForce GTX 460 (OEM)		36400 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 4870 512MB		30000 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 6400 (21%)

Pixel Rate

If using a high screen resolution is important to you, then the GeForce GTX 460 (OEM) is a better choice, and very much so. (explain)

GeForce GTX 460 (OEM)		20800 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 4870 512MB		12000 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 8800 (73%)

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

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

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels the video card can possibly record to its local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is calculated by multiplying the number of colour ROPs by the the card's clock speed. 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 fill rate is also dependant on quite a few other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the ability to get to the maximum fill rate.