GeForce GTX 880M vs Radeon HD 4870 2GB

Intro

Compare those specifications to the Radeon HD 4870 2GB, which features GPU clock speed of 750 MHz, and 2048 MB of GDDR5 memory set to run at 900 MHz through a 256-bit bus. It also is comprised of 800(160x5) Stream Processors, 40 Texture Address Units, and 16 Raster Operation Units.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce GTX 880M		130 Watts
Radeon HD 4870 2GB		150 Watts
	Difference: 20 Watts (15%)

Memory Bandwidth

In theory, the GeForce GTX 880M is 11% quicker than the Radeon HD 4870 2GB overall, due to its higher bandwidth. (explain)

GeForce GTX 880M		128000 MB/sec
Radeon HD 4870 2GB		115200 MB/sec
	Difference: 12800 (11%)

Texel Rate

The GeForce GTX 880M will be quite a bit (about 307%) more effective at anisotropic filtering than the Radeon HD 4870 2GB. (explain)

GeForce GTX 880M		122112 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 4870 2GB		30000 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 92112 (307%)

Pixel Rate

If using lots of anti-aliasing is important to you, then the GeForce GTX 880M is the winner, and very much so. (explain)

GeForce GTX 880M		30528 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 4870 2GB		12000 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 18528 (154%)

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 (counted in megabytes per second) that can be transported over the external memory interface in a second. It is calculated by multiplying the bus width by its memory clock speed. If the card has DDR RAM, it should be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher the card's 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 amount of texture map elements (texels) that can be processed in one second. This number is worked out by multiplying the total number of texture units by the core speed of the chip. The higher this number, the better the video card will be at texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels applied in a second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum number of pixels the graphics card could possibly record to the local memory per 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 - aka Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel output rate is also dependant on many other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the ability to reach the max fill rate.