GeForce GTX 470 vs Radeon HD 4870 X2

Intro

Compare all that to the Radeon HD 4870 X2, which features GPU clock speed of 750 MHz, and 1024 MB of GDDR5 RAM running at 900 MHz through a 256-bit bus. It also is made up of 800(160x5) Stream Processors, 40 Texture Address Units, and 16 Raster Operation Units.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce GTX 470		215 Watts
Radeon HD 4870 X2		350 Watts
	Difference: 135 Watts (63%)

Memory Bandwidth

Performance-wise, the Radeon HD 4870 X2 should theoretically be a lot superior to the GeForce GTX 470 in general. (explain)

Radeon HD 4870 X2		230400 MB/sec
GeForce GTX 470		133920 MB/sec
	Difference: 96480 (72%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 4870 X2 should be a lot (more or less 77%) faster with regards to anisotropic filtering than the GeForce GTX 470. (explain)

Radeon HD 4870 X2		60000 Mtexels/sec
GeForce GTX 470		33992 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 26008 (77%)

Pixel Rate

If running with lots of anti-aliasing is important to you, then the GeForce GTX 470 is the winner, but not by far. (explain)

GeForce GTX 470		24280 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 4870 X2		24000 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 280 (1%)

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: Memory bandwidth is the maximum amount of information (measured in megabytes per second) that can be transferred over the external memory interface in a second. The number is worked out by multiplying the interface width by the speed of its memory. If it uses DDR RAM, it should be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The better the memory bandwidth, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, HDR and higher screen 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 the texel rate, the better the card will be at handling texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels applied per second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels the graphics card can possibly write to its local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is worked out by multiplying the number of Raster Operations Pipelines by the the card's clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - aka Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel output rate also depends on quite a few other factors, especially the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to get to the max fill rate.