In terms of overall gaming performance, the graphical capabilities of the Nvidia GeForce GTX 470 Golden Sample Edition are massively better than the AMD Radeon HD 4730 PowerColor PCS Edition.

The HD 4730 has a 50 MHz higher core clock speed than the GTX 470, but the GTX 470 has 24 more Texture Mapping Units than the HD 4730. As a result, the GTX 470 exhibits a 14 GTexel/s better Texture Fill Rate than the HD 4730. This still holds weight but shader performance is generally more relevant, particularly since both of these GPUs support at least DirectX 10.

The HD 4730 has a 50 MHz higher core clock speed than the GTX 470, but the GTX 470 has 32 more Render Output Units than the HD 4730. As a result, the GTX 470 exhibits a 20.4 GPixel/s better Pixel Fill Rate than the HD 4730. However, both GPUs support DirectX 9 or above, and pixeling performance is only really relevant when comparing older cards.

The GTX 470 was released less than a year after the HD 4730, and so they are likely to have similar driver support for optimizing performance when running the latest games.

The GTX 470 has 768 MB more video memory than the HD 4730, so is likely to be much better at displaying game textures at higher resolutions. This is supported by the fact that the GTX 470 also has superior memory performance overall.

The GTX 470 has 78.4 GB/sec greater memory bandwidth than the HD 4730, which means that the memory performance of the GTX 470 is much better than the HD 4730.

The GeForce GTX 470 Golden Sample Edition has 448 Shader Processing Units and the Radeon HD 4730 PowerColor PCS Edition has 640. However, the actual shader performance of the GTX 470 is 582 and the actual shader performance of the HD 4730 is 291. The GTX 470 having 291 better shader performance and an altogether better performance when taking into account other relevant data means that the GTX 470 delivers a massively smoother and more efficient experience when processing graphical data than the HD 4730.

The GTX 470 transistor size technology is 15 nm (nanometers) smaller than the HD 4730. This means that the GTX 470 is expected to run slightly cooler and achieve higher clock frequencies than the HD 4730.

The GeForce GTX 470 Golden Sample Edition requires 215 Watts to run but there is no entry for the Radeon HD 4730 PowerColor PCS Edition. We would recommend a PSU with at least 550 Watts for the GTX 470 and a PSU with at least 450 Watts for the HD 4730. The GTX 470 has been recommended a PSU with 100 Watts more than the HD 4730. The difference is significant enough that the GTX 470 may have an adverse affect on your yearly electricity bills in comparison to the HD 4730.