GeForce GTX 880M vs Radeon HD 4870 X2

Intro

Compare that to the Radeon HD 4870 X2, which makes use of a 55 nm design. AMD has set the core frequency at 750 MHz. The GDDR5 RAM works at a frequency of 900 MHz on this model. It features 800(160x5) SPUs along with 40 TAUs and 16 Rasterization Operator Units.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce GTX 880M		130 Watts
Radeon HD 4870 X2		350 Watts
	Difference: 220 Watts (169%)

Memory Bandwidth

The Radeon HD 4870 X2 should in theory perform quite a bit faster than the GeForce GTX 880M overall. (explain)

Radeon HD 4870 X2		230400 MB/sec
GeForce GTX 880M		128000 MB/sec
	Difference: 102400 (80%)

Texel Rate

The GeForce GTX 880M should be much (about 104%) more effective at anisotropic filtering than the Radeon HD 4870 X2. (explain)

GeForce GTX 880M		122112 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 4870 X2		60000 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 62112 (104%)

Pixel Rate

If running with high levels of AA is important to you, then the GeForce GTX 880M is the winner, by a large margin. (explain)

GeForce GTX 880M		30528 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 4870 X2		24000 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 6528 (27%)

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: Memory bandwidth is the largest amount of information (counted in megabytes per second) that can be transferred over the external memory interface within a second. It is calculated by multiplying the card's bus width by the speed of its memory. If it uses 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, HDR and higher screen resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum texture map elements (texels) that are applied in one second. This is worked out 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 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 card can possibly record to the local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is calculated by multiplying the number of Raster Operations Pipelines by the clock speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - aka Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel output rate also depends on many other factors, especially the memory bandwidth - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the potential to reach the maximum fill rate.