GeForce GTX 460 2GB vs Radeon HD 4870 X2

Intro

Compare those specs to the Radeon HD 4870 X2, which comes with a clock frequency of 750 MHz and a GDDR5 memory frequency of 900 MHz. It also makes use of a 256-bit bus, and uses a 55 nm design. It is comprised of 800(160x5) SPUs, 40 TAUs, and 16 Raster Operation Units.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce GTX 460 2GB		160 Watts
Radeon HD 4870 X2		350 Watts
	Difference: 190 Watts (119%)

Memory Bandwidth

In theory, the Radeon HD 4870 X2 should be much faster than the GeForce GTX 460 2GB in general. (explain)

Radeon HD 4870 X2		230400 MB/sec
GeForce GTX 460 2GB		115200 MB/sec
	Difference: 115200 (100%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 4870 X2 is quite a bit (about 59%) faster with regards to anisotropic filtering than the GeForce GTX 460 2GB. (explain)

Radeon HD 4870 X2		60000 Mtexels/sec
GeForce GTX 460 2GB		37800 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 22200 (59%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon HD 4870 X2 will be a little bit (about 11%) better at AA than the GeForce GTX 460 2GB, and also will be able to handle higher resolutions without slowing down too much. (explain)

Radeon HD 4870 X2		24000 Mpixels/sec
GeForce GTX 460 2GB		21600 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 2400 (11%)

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 max amount of information (counted in megabytes per second) that can be moved over the external memory interface in one second. It is worked out by multiplying the card's interface width by its memory speed. If it uses DDR type memory, the result should be multiplied by 2 once 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 AA, HDR 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 by the core clock speed of the chip. The higher this number, the better the video card will be at texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels applied per second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels that the graphics card could possibly record to the local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is calculated by multiplying the amount of ROPs by the clock speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also 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, most notably the memory bandwidth - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to get to the maximum fill rate.