GeForce GTX 285 1GB vs Radeon HD 7870 XT

Intro

Compare those specifications to the Radeon HD 7870 XT, which comes with a GPU core clock speed of 925 MHz, and 2048 MB of GDDR5 RAM running at 1500 MHz through a 256-bit bus. It also is made up of 1536 Stream Processors, 96 Texture Address Units, and 32 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon HD 7870 XT		185 Watts
GeForce GTX 285 1GB		204 Watts
	Difference: 19 Watts (10%)

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically speaking, the Radeon HD 7870 XT should perform a lot faster than the GeForce GTX 285 1GB in general. (explain)

Radeon HD 7870 XT		192000 MB/sec
GeForce GTX 285 1GB		158976 MB/sec
	Difference: 33024 (21%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 7870 XT is a lot (more or less 71%) faster with regards to anisotropic filtering than the GeForce GTX 285 1GB. (explain)

Radeon HD 7870 XT		88800 Mtexels/sec
GeForce GTX 285 1GB		51840 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 36960 (71%)

Pixel Rate

If using a high screen resolution is important to you, then the Radeon HD 7870 XT is a better choice, by far. (explain)

Radeon HD 7870 XT		29600 Mpixels/sec
GeForce GTX 285 1GB		20736 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 8864 (43%)

Please note that the above 'benchmarks' are all just theoretical - the results were calculated based on the card's specifications, and real-world performance may (and probably will) vary at least a bit.

Price Comparison

Specifications

Memory Bandwidth: Bandwidth is the max amount of information (counted in megabytes per second) that can be moved past the external memory interface in one second. It is worked out by multiplying the card's interface width by its memory speed. In the case of DDR type RAM, it should be multiplied by 2 again. If DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The higher the card's memory bandwidth, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, HDR and high resolutions.

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

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum number of pixels the graphics card could possibly write to its local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is calculated by multiplying the amount of colour ROPs by the clock speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - sometimes also referred to as Render Output Units) are responsible for filling the screen with pixels (the image). The actual pixel fill rate also depends on lots of other factors, especially the memory bandwidth - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to reach the maximum fill rate.