GeForce GTX 470 vs Radeon HD 4870 X2

Intro

Compare all that to the Radeon HD 4870 X2, which features clock speeds of 750 MHz on the GPU, and 900 MHz on the 1024 MB of GDDR5 RAM. 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 470		215 Watts
Radeon HD 4870 X2		350 Watts
	Difference: 135 Watts (63%)

Memory Bandwidth

As far as performance goes, the Radeon HD 4870 X2 should theoretically be a lot superior to the GeForce GTX 470 in general. (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 (about 77%) faster with regards to texture 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 small bit (about 1%) more effective at full screen anti-aliasing than the Radeon HD 4870 X2, and will be 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 max amount of information (counted in megabytes per second) that can be transferred over the external memory interface in one second. It's worked out by multiplying the card's bus width by its memory speed. In the case of DDR type RAM, it should be multiplied by 2 once again. If DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The higher the memory bandwidth, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, HDR and higher screen resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum texture map elements (texels) that are processed per second. This is calculated by multiplying the total number of texture units by the core speed of the chip. The better the texel rate, the better the graphics card will be at texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels applied in a second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels that the graphics card could possibly write to its local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is calculated by multiplying the amount of Raster Operations Pipelines by the the core 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 fill rate is also dependant on lots of other factors, especially the memory bandwidth - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the ability to get to the maximum fill rate.