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 4650 v2.

The GTX 470 has a 50 MHz higher core clock speed and 24 more Texture Mapping Units than the HD 4650. This results in the GTX 470 providing 17.2 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 470 has a 50 MHz higher core clock speed and 32 more Render Output Units than the HD 4650. This results in the GTX 470 providing 21.2 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 470 was released over a year more recently than the HD 4650, and so the GTX 470 is likely to have better driver support, meaning it will be more optimized for running the latest games when compared to the HD 4650.

The GTX 470 has 256 MB more video memory than the HD 4650, so is likely to be slightly 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 112 GB/sec greater memory bandwidth than the HD 4650, which means that the memory performance of the GTX 470 is massively better than the HD 4650.

The Radeon HD 4650 v2 has 320 Shader Processing Units and the GeForce GTX 470 Golden Sample Edition has 448. However, the actual shader performance of the HD 4650 is 134 and the actual shader performance of the GTX 470 is 582. The GTX 470 having 448 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 4650.

The GTX 470 transistor size technology is 15 nm (nanometers) smaller than the HD 4650. This means that the GTX 470 is expected to run slightly cooler and achieve higher clock frequencies than the HD 4650.

The Radeon HD 4650 v2 requires 48 Watts to run and the GeForce GTX 470 Golden Sample Edition requires 215 Watts. We would recommend a PSU with at least 400 Watts for the HD 4650 and a PSU with at least 550 Watts for the GTX 470. The GTX 470 requires 167 Watts more than the HD 4650 to run. The difference is significant enough that the GTX 470 may have an adverse affect on your yearly electricity bills in comparison to the HD 4650.