GeForce 8800 Ultra vs Radeon HD 4870 X2

Intro

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

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce 8800 Ultra		171 Watts
Radeon HD 4870 X2		350 Watts
	Difference: 179 Watts (105%)

Memory Bandwidth

Performance-wise, the Radeon HD 4870 X2 should in theory be a lot superior to the GeForce 8800 Ultra in general. (explain)

Radeon HD 4870 X2		230400 MB/sec
GeForce 8800 Ultra		103680 MB/sec
	Difference: 126720 (122%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 4870 X2 should be much (more or less 53%) better at texture filtering than the GeForce 8800 Ultra. (explain)

Radeon HD 4870 X2		60000 Mtexels/sec
GeForce 8800 Ultra		39168 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 20832 (53%)

Pixel Rate

If using a high screen resolution is important to you, then the Radeon HD 4870 X2 is the winner, by far. (explain)

Radeon HD 4870 X2		24000 Mpixels/sec
GeForce 8800 Ultra		14688 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 9312 (63%)

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 max amount of data (measured in megabytes per second) that can be transferred past the external memory interface in a second. The number is worked out by multiplying the interface 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 better the bandwidth is, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, HDR and high resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum texture map elements (texels) that are processed in one second. This number is calculated by multiplying the total number of texture units of the card by the core clock speed of the chip. The higher 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 number of pixels the video card could possibly record to the local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is worked out by multiplying the number of Raster Operations Pipelines by the the card's clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also called Render Output Units) are responsible for drawing the pixels (image) on the screen. The actual pixel fill rate is also dependant on many other factors, especially the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to get to the max fill rate.