GeForce GTX 460 vs Radeon HD 4870 2GB

Intro

Compare that to the Radeon HD 4870 2GB, which features GPU clock speed of 750 MHz, and 2048 MB of GDDR5 RAM set to run at 900 MHz through a 256-bit bus. It also features 800(160x5) SPUs, 40 Texture Address Units, and 16 Raster Operation Units.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Both cards have the same power consumption.

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically speaking, the Radeon HD 4870 2GB should perform a lot faster than the GeForce GTX 460 overall. (explain)

Radeon HD 4870 2GB		115200 MB/sec
GeForce GTX 460		86400 MB/sec
	Difference: 28800 (33%)

Texel Rate

The GeForce GTX 460 will be much (about 26%) faster with regards to anisotropic filtering than the Radeon HD 4870 2GB. (explain)

GeForce GTX 460		37800 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 4870 2GB		30000 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 7800 (26%)

Pixel Rate

If using lots of anti-aliasing is important to you, then the GeForce GTX 460 is the winner, by a large margin. (explain)

GeForce GTX 460		16200 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 4870 2GB		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: Memory bandwidth is the largest amount of data (counted in megabytes per second) that can be transported past the external memory interface in one second. It is worked out by multiplying the card's interface width by its memory clock speed. If it uses DDR type memory, it should be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The better 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 amount of texture map elements (texels) that can be 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 better 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 a second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels that the graphics card can possibly write to the local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is calculated by multiplying the number of Raster Operations Pipelines by the the core clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - aka Render Output Units) are responsible for drawing the pixels (image) on the screen. The actual pixel rate also depends on many other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the ability to get to the max fill rate.