Radeon HD 3870 512MB vs Radeon HD 4730

Intro

Compare those specifications to the Radeon HD 4730, which comes with clock speeds of 700 MHz on the GPU, and 900 MHz on the 512 MB of GDDR5 RAM. It features 640(128x5) SPUs as well as 32 TAUs and 8 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon HD 3870 512MB		106 Watts
Radeon HD 4730		140 Watts
	Difference: 34 Watts (32%)

Memory Bandwidth

Both cards have exactly the same bandwidth, so theoretically they should have identical performance. (explain)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 4730 is quite a bit (approximately 81%) faster with regards to texture filtering than the Radeon HD 3870 512MB. (explain)

Radeon HD 4730		22400 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 3870 512MB		12400 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 10000 (81%)

Pixel Rate

If running with high levels of AA is important to you, then the Radeon HD 3870 512MB is the winner, by far. (explain)

Radeon HD 3870 512MB		12400 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 4730		5600 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 6800 (121%)

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

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum amount of texture map elements (texels) that are processed in one second. This is calculated by multiplying the total number of texture units of the card by the core speed of the chip. The better this number, the better the card will be at texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels processed in one second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels that the graphics card could possibly write to the local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is worked out by multiplying the number of ROPs by the the card's clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - sometimes also referred to as Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to 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 reach the maximum fill rate.