GeForce GTX 660 Ti vs Radeon HD 4870 2GB

Intro

Compare all of that to the Radeon HD 4870 2GB, which features a GPU core clock speed of 750 MHz, and 2048 MB of GDDR5 memory running at 900 MHz through a 256-bit bus. It also is made up of 800(160x5) SPUs, 40 TAUs, and 16 Raster Operation Units.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Both cards have the same power consumption.

Memory Bandwidth

The GeForce GTX 660 Ti, in theory, should be much faster than the Radeon HD 4870 2GB overall. (explain)

GeForce GTX 660 Ti		144000 MB/sec
Radeon HD 4870 2GB		115200 MB/sec
	Difference: 28800 (25%)

Texel Rate

The GeForce GTX 660 Ti is a lot (approximately 242%) more effective at anisotropic filtering than the Radeon HD 4870 2GB. (explain)

GeForce GTX 660 Ti		102480 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 4870 2GB		30000 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 72480 (242%)

Pixel Rate

If running with high levels of AA is important to you, then the GeForce GTX 660 Ti is superior to the Radeon HD 4870 2GB, by a large margin. (explain)

GeForce GTX 660 Ti		21960 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 4870 2GB		12000 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 9960 (83%)

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: Memory bandwidth is the largest amount of data (counted in megabytes per second) that can be transported across the external memory interface in one second. It's worked out by multiplying the bus width by its memory speed. If it uses DDR type memory, it must be multiplied by 2 once 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 number of texture map elements (texels) that are applied per second. This is worked out by multiplying the total amount of texture units of the card 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 in a second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum amount of pixels the video card can possibly record to its local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is calculated by multiplying the amount of Raster Operations Pipelines by the the core 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 fill rate is also dependant on many other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to reach the max fill rate.