Radeon HD 3870 1GB vs Radeon HD 5750 512MB

Intro

The Radeon HD 3870 1GB makes use of a 55 nm design. AMD has set the core speed at 775 MHz. The GDDR4 RAM is set to run at a frequency of 1125 MHz on this particular card. It features 320(64x5) SPUs along with 16 Texture Address Units and 16 Rasterization Operator Units.

Compare all of that to the Radeon HD 5750 512MB, which makes use of a 40 nm design. AMD has set the core speed at 700 MHz. The GDDR5 RAM runs at a frequency of 1150 MHz on this particular card. It features 720(144x5) SPUs as well as 36 Texture Address Units and 16 Rasterization Operator Units.

Price Comparison

Specifications

Memory Bandwidth: Memory bandwidth is the maximum amount of data (in units of MB per second) that can be transported past the external memory interface in a second. It's calculated by multiplying the card's interface width by its memory clock speed. In the case of DDR type RAM, the result should be multiplied by 2 once again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The higher the card's memory bandwidth, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, High Dynamic Range and high resolutions.

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

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum amount of pixels that the graphics chip could possibly write to its local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is worked out by multiplying the amount of colour ROPs by the the core speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - sometimes also referred to as Render Output Units) are responsible for drawing the pixels (image) on the screen. The actual pixel fill rate also depends on quite a few other factors, especially the memory bandwidth - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to get to the maximum fill rate.