In terms of overall gaming performance, the graphical capabilities of the Nvidia GeForce GTX 650 Ti Power Edition OC 1GB are significantly better than the AMD Radeon HD 4870.

The GTX 650 Ti has a 243 MHz higher core clock speed and 24 more Texture Mapping Units than the Radeon HD 4870. This results in the GTX 650 Ti providing 33.6 GTexel/s better texturing performance. This still holds weight but shader performance is generally more relevant, particularly since both of these GPUs support at least DirectX 10.

The GTX 650 Ti has a 243 MHz higher core clock speed than the Radeon HD 4870 and the same number of Render Output Units. This results in the GTX 650 Ti providing 3.9 GPixel/s better pixeling performance. However, both GPUs support DirectX 9 or above, and pixeling performance is only really relevant when comparing older cards.

The GTX 650 Ti was released over three years more recently than the Radeon HD 4870, and so the GTX 650 Ti is likely to have far better driver support, meaning it will be much more optimized and ultimately superior to the Radeon HD 4870 when running the latest games.

The GTX 650 Ti has 512 MB more video memory than the Radeon HD 4870, so is likely to be much better at displaying game textures at higher resolutions. However, the overall memory performance is about the same.

The Radeon HD 4870 has 28.8 GB/sec greater memory bandwidth than the GTX 650 Ti, which means that the memory performance of the Radeon HD 4870 is slightly better than the GTX 650 Ti.

The GeForce GTX 650 Ti Power Edition OC 1GB has 768 Shader Processing Units and the Radeon HD 4870 has 800. However, the actual shader performance of the GTX 650 Ti is 763 and the actual shader performance of the Radeon HD 4870 is 390. The GTX 650 Ti having 373 better shader performance and an altogether better performance when taking into account other relevant data means that the GTX 650 Ti delivers a marginally smoother and more efficient experience when processing graphical data than the Radeon HD 4870.

The GTX 650 Ti transistor size technology is 27 nm (nanometers) smaller than the Radeon HD 4870. This means that the GTX 650 Ti is expected to run slightly cooler and achieve higher clock frequencies than the Radeon HD 4870.

The Radeon HD 4870 requires 150 Watts to run but there is no entry for the GTX 650 Ti. We would recommend a PSU with at least 500 Watts for the Radeon HD 4870, but we do not have a recommended PSU wattage for the GTX 650 Ti.