GeForce GTX 970M vs Radeon HD 4870 512MB

Intro

Compare all that to the Radeon HD 4870 512MB, which comes with core speeds of 750 MHz on the GPU, and 900 MHz on the 512 MB of GDDR5 RAM. It features 800(160x5) SPUs along with 40 Texture Address Units and 16 Rasterization Operator Units.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce GTX 970M		75 Watts
Radeon HD 4870 512MB		150 Watts
	Difference: 75 Watts (100%)

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically speaking, the Radeon HD 4870 512MB should be just a bit faster than the GeForce GTX 970M in general. (explain)

Radeon HD 4870 512MB		115200 MB/sec
GeForce GTX 970M		96000 MB/sec
	Difference: 19200 (20%)

Texel Rate

The GeForce GTX 970M should be much (approximately 146%) more effective at AF than the Radeon HD 4870 512MB. (explain)

GeForce GTX 970M		73920 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 4870 512MB		30000 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 43920 (146%)

Pixel Rate

If running with high levels of AA is important to you, then the GeForce GTX 970M is a better choice, and very much so. (explain)

GeForce GTX 970M		44352 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 4870 512MB		12000 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 32352 (270%)

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 information (in units of MB per second) that can be transferred across the external memory interface in one second. It is calculated by multiplying the bus width by the speed of its memory. If it uses DDR type RAM, it should be multiplied by 2 again. If DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The higher the card's memory bandwidth, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, High Dynamic Range and high resolutions.

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

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels the video card can possibly record to the local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is worked out by multiplying the amount of Raster Operations Pipelines by the the card's clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - sometimes also referred to as Render Output Units) are responsible for filling the screen with pixels (the image). The actual pixel rate also depends on lots of other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the potential to reach the max fill rate.