GeForce GTX 470 vs Radeon HD 4730

Intro

Compare all of that to the Radeon HD 4730, which comes with clock speeds of 700 MHz on the GPU, and 900 MHz on the 512 MB of GDDR5 RAM. It features 640(128x5) SPUs along with 32 Texture Address Units and 8 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon HD 4730		140 Watts
GeForce GTX 470		215 Watts
	Difference: 75 Watts (54%)

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically speaking, the GeForce GTX 470 will be 133% quicker than the Radeon HD 4730 overall, due to its greater data rate. (explain)

GeForce GTX 470		133920 MB/sec
Radeon HD 4730		57600 MB/sec
	Difference: 76320 (133%)

Texel Rate

The GeForce GTX 470 is quite a bit (more or less 52%) more effective at anisotropic filtering than the Radeon HD 4730. (explain)

GeForce GTX 470		33992 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 4730		22400 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 11592 (52%)

Pixel Rate

If using a high resolution is important to you, then the GeForce GTX 470 is the winner, by a large margin. (explain)

GeForce GTX 470		24280 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 4730		5600 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 18680 (334%)

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 maximum amount of data (in units of megabytes per second) that can be transferred across the external memory interface in a second. It's calculated by multiplying the bus width by its memory speed. If it uses DDR RAM, it should be multiplied by 2 again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The better the bandwidth is, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, HDR and high resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum number of texture map elements (texels) that can be processed in one second. This number 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 handling texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels processed per second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum number of pixels that the graphics card can possibly record to the local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is worked out by multiplying the number of ROPs by the the core clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also called Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel rate also depends on many other factors, especially the memory bandwidth - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the ability to reach the maximum fill rate.