GeForce GTX 460 vs Radeon HD 4870 512MB

Intro

Compare all that to the Radeon HD 4870 512MB, which comes with clock speeds of 750 MHz on the GPU, and 900 MHz on the 512 MB of GDDR5 RAM. It features 800(160x5) SPUs as well as 40 Texture Address Units and 16 Rasterization Operator Units.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Both cards have the same power consumption.

Memory Bandwidth

In theory, the Radeon HD 4870 512MB is 33% faster than the GeForce GTX 460 overall, due to its higher data rate. (explain)

Radeon HD 4870 512MB		115200 MB/sec
GeForce GTX 460		86400 MB/sec
	Difference: 28800 (33%)

Texel Rate

The GeForce GTX 460 should be a lot (approximately 26%) faster with regards to AF than the Radeon HD 4870 512MB. (explain)

GeForce GTX 460		37800 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 4870 512MB		30000 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 7800 (26%)

Pixel Rate

If using high levels of AA is important to you, then the GeForce GTX 460 is a better choice, by far. (explain)

GeForce GTX 460		16200 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 4870 512MB		12000 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 4200 (35%)

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 data (in units of megabytes per second) that can be transferred past the external memory interface in a second. It is worked out by multiplying the interface width by its memory clock speed. In the case of DDR memory, the result should be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The higher the card's memory bandwidth, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, High Dynamic Range and high resolutions.

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

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum amount of pixels the graphics card can possibly write to the local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure 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 drawing the pixels (image) on the screen. The actual pixel fill rate also depends on lots of 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.