GeForce GTX 470 vs Radeon HD 4870 X2

Intro

Compare all that to the Radeon HD 4870 X2, which has GPU core speed of 750 MHz, and 1024 MB of GDDR5 RAM set to run at 900 MHz through a 256-bit bus. It also is made up of 800(160x5) SPUs, 40 Texture Address Units, and 16 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce GTX 470		215 Watts
Radeon HD 4870 X2		350 Watts
	Difference: 135 Watts (63%)

Memory Bandwidth

Performance-wise, the Radeon HD 4870 X2 should in theory be quite a bit superior to the GeForce GTX 470 overall. (explain)

Radeon HD 4870 X2		230400 MB/sec
GeForce GTX 470		133920 MB/sec
	Difference: 96480 (72%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 4870 X2 is much (more or less 77%) faster with regards to anisotropic filtering than the GeForce GTX 470. (explain)

Radeon HD 4870 X2		60000 Mtexels/sec
GeForce GTX 470		33992 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 26008 (77%)

Pixel Rate

The GeForce GTX 470 should be a bit (more or less 1%) better at full screen anti-aliasing than the Radeon HD 4870 X2, and able to handle higher resolutions more effectively. (explain)

GeForce GTX 470		24280 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 4870 X2		24000 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 280 (1%)

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: Bandwidth is the largest amount of information (counted in megabytes per second) that can be transported past the external memory interface within a second. It's worked out by multiplying the card's interface width by the speed of its memory. If it uses DDR type memory, 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 high resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum number of texture map elements (texels) that are processed per second. This figure is calculated by multiplying the total texture units by the core speed of the chip. The better this number, the better the graphics 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 the graphics card could 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 Raster Operations Pipelines by the clock speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also sometimes called Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel fill rate is also dependant on quite a few other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the potential to get to the maximum fill rate.