Geforce GTX 670 vs Radeon HD 4870 X2

Intro

Compare those specifications to the Radeon HD 4870 X2, which uses a 55 nm design. AMD has clocked the core frequency at 750 MHz. The GDDR5 RAM works at a frequency of 900 MHz on this particular card. 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 670		170 Watts
Radeon HD 4870 X2		350 Watts
	Difference: 180 Watts (106%)

Memory Bandwidth

The Radeon HD 4870 X2 should in theory perform a bit faster than the Geforce GTX 670 in general. (explain)

Radeon HD 4870 X2		230400 MB/sec
Geforce GTX 670		192000 MB/sec
	Difference: 38400 (20%)

Texel Rate

The Geforce GTX 670 is quite a bit (more or less 71%) more effective at anisotropic filtering than the Radeon HD 4870 X2. (explain)

Geforce GTX 670		102480 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 4870 X2		60000 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 42480 (71%)

Pixel Rate

If running with a high resolution is important to you, then the Geforce GTX 670 is a better choice, by a large margin. (explain)

Geforce GTX 670		29280 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 4870 X2		24000 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 5280 (22%)

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 largest amount of information (counted in MB per second) that can be moved over the external memory interface within a second. The number is worked out by multiplying the bus width by the speed of its memory. In the case of DDR RAM, it should be multiplied by 2 again. If DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The higher 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 can be processed per second. This number is worked out by multiplying the total number of texture units by the core speed of the chip. The better this number, the better the video card will be at texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels per second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum number of pixels the video card can possibly record to its local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is calculated by multiplying the number of Raster Operations Pipelines by the clock speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also sometimes called Render Output Units) are responsible for filling the screen with pixels (the image). The actual pixel rate also depends on many other factors, especially the memory bandwidth - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the potential to reach the maximum fill rate.