GeForce GTX 480 vs Radeon HD 4870 1GB

Intro

Compare those specifications to the Radeon HD 4870 1GB, which makes use of a 55 nm design. AMD has set the core frequency at 750 MHz. The GDDR5 RAM is set to run at a speed of 900 MHz on this specific card. It features 800(160x5) SPUs along with 40 Texture Address Units and 16 Rasterization Operator Units.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon HD 4870 1GB		150 Watts
GeForce GTX 480		250 Watts
	Difference: 100 Watts (67%)

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically, the GeForce GTX 480 should perform much faster than the Radeon HD 4870 1GB overall. (explain)

GeForce GTX 480		177408 MB/sec
Radeon HD 4870 1GB		115200 MB/sec
	Difference: 62208 (54%)

Texel Rate

The GeForce GTX 480 should be quite a bit (approximately 40%) better at anisotropic filtering than the Radeon HD 4870 1GB. (explain)

GeForce GTX 480		42000 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 4870 1GB		30000 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 12000 (40%)

Pixel Rate

If using lots of anti-aliasing is important to you, then the GeForce GTX 480 is a better choice, by a large margin. (explain)

GeForce GTX 480		33600 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 4870 1GB		12000 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 21600 (180%)

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 largest amount of data (in units of MB per second) that can be moved past the external memory interface in one second. The number is worked out by multiplying the card's bus width by its memory clock speed. If the card has DDR type RAM, it should be multiplied by 2 once again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher the memory bandwidth, the better 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 number of texture map elements (texels) that can be applied in one second. This figure is worked out by multiplying the total texture units by the core speed of the chip. The better the texel rate, the better the card will be at texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels in one second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels that the graphics chip could possibly record to the local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is worked out by multiplying the number of Render Output Units by the clock speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - sometimes also referred to as Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel fill rate is also dependant on quite a few other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the ability to reach the maximum fill rate.