What NVIDIA Graphics Card is the ATI Radeon HD 4870 equal to?

I am a student and I will need PC for the projects of my college. Well I was first planning to have laptop but then I switched myself to go for the desktop computer. Well the desktop that I am going to get will be having an ATI Radeon 4870 with 1GB GDDR5 Ram. The only thing that is bothering me is that will it be able to beat the NVIDIA Geforce 9800 with 1GB GDDR3 that I was having on my previous system? I want a clear discussion based on the performance scale. Please help.

From the title I thought that you were asking for the list of the NVIDIA cards that are in match for the ATI Radeon HD 4870. Well I will first of all say that Radeon 4870 is approximately equal to Nvidia's GTX 260. Also this card from ATI side is also better than the newer Radeon 5770. However it fails on some things but yet it is faster. It is only lagging the DX 11 support that is present in the Radeon 5770. I will soon get on the desk with the NVIDIA Geforce 9800, soon.

Yes when you ask for the NVIDIA card that is equivalent to the ATI Radeon HD 4870, then I think that is feasible to name GTX 260. If you ever go for a clear comparison then you will find that ATI Radeon HD 4870 is lot better than Nvidia's GTX 260 in all respect. I have found most of the places where they have discussed this and found that ATI Radeon HD 4870 is far-far better than GTX 260. The one who is a pure gamer and wants to feel the game from the heart the 4870 seems to be a steal.

With all the most recent features, the ATI Radeon HD 4000 series graphics cards transports the performance that you will need to take your high-definition experience to the much more higher level at home and play. With ATI Radeon HD 4870 X2 Graphics I think that the best just got better. It has 1600 stream processors along with 2 GB of GDDR5 memory that have been joined to generate the fastest and most influential graphics card. I think that it will beat the NVIDIA Geforce 9800.