GeForce GTX 550 Ti vs Radeon HD 4870 X2

Intro

Compare all that to the Radeon HD 4870 X2, which comes with core speeds of 750 MHz on the GPU, and 900 MHz on the 1024 MB of GDDR5 RAM. It features 800(160x5) SPUs along with 40 Texture Address Units and 16 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce GTX 550 Ti		116 Watts
Radeon HD 4870 X2		350 Watts
	Difference: 234 Watts (202%)

Memory Bandwidth

Performance-wise, the Radeon HD 4870 X2 should theoretically be quite a bit superior to the GeForce GTX 550 Ti overall. (explain)

Radeon HD 4870 X2		230400 MB/sec
GeForce GTX 550 Ti		98496 MB/sec
	Difference: 131904 (134%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 4870 X2 should be much (approximately 108%) better at AF than the GeForce GTX 550 Ti. (explain)

Radeon HD 4870 X2		60000 Mtexels/sec
GeForce GTX 550 Ti		28800 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 31200 (108%)

Pixel Rate

If running with lots of anti-aliasing is important to you, then the Radeon HD 4870 X2 is the winner, though not by far. (explain)

Radeon HD 4870 X2		24000 Mpixels/sec
GeForce GTX 550 Ti		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: Memory bandwidth is the maximum amount of information (measured in MB per second) that can be transported across the external memory interface in a second. It is worked out by multiplying the card's bus width by the speed of its memory. In the case of DDR RAM, it must be multiplied by 2 again. If DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The better the bandwidth is, the better 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 are applied in one second. This is calculated by multiplying the total amount of texture units of the card by the core clock 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 in one second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum number of pixels the video card could possibly write to the local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is calculated by multiplying the number of ROPs by the the core 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 many other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the potential to reach the max fill rate.