GeForce GTX 460 2GB vs Radeon HD 4870 512MB

Intro

Compare all that to the Radeon HD 4870 512MB, which uses a 55 nm design. AMD has clocked the core frequency at 750 MHz. The GDDR5 RAM runs at a speed of 900 MHz on this particular model. It features 800(160x5) SPUs along with 40 TAUs and 16 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon HD 4870 512MB		150 Watts
GeForce GTX 460 2GB		160 Watts
	Difference: 10 Watts (7%)

Memory Bandwidth

Both cards have exactly the same bandwidth, so theoretically they should perform the same. (explain)

Texel Rate

The GeForce GTX 460 2GB is much (approximately 26%) faster with regards to texture filtering than the Radeon HD 4870 512MB. (explain)

GeForce GTX 460 2GB		37800 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 4870 512MB		30000 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 7800 (26%)

Pixel Rate

The GeForce GTX 460 2GB should be a lot (more or less 80%) better at AA than the Radeon HD 4870 512MB, and capable of handling higher screen resolutions without losing too much performance. (explain)

GeForce GTX 460 2GB		21600 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 4870 512MB		12000 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 9600 (80%)

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 max amount of information (in units of megabytes per second) that can be moved across the external memory interface in a second. It is calculated by multiplying the card's interface width by the speed of its memory. If the card has DDR RAM, the result should be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The higher the bandwidth is, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, HDR and high resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum amount of texture map elements (texels) that can be applied per second. This figure is worked out by multiplying the total number of texture units of the card by the core speed of the chip. The better this number, the better the card will be at handling texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels per second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum amount of pixels that the graphics chip can possibly record to the local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is calculated by multiplying the number of colour ROPs by the the core clock speed. 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 rate also depends on lots of other factors, especially the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to reach the maximum fill rate.