GeForce GTX 285 1GB vs Radeon HD 3870 X2 1GB

Intro

Compare those specifications to the Radeon HD 3870 X2 1GB, which uses a 55 nm design. AMD has clocked the core frequency at 825 MHz. The GDDR4 memory is set to run at a speed of 1126 MHz on this specific card. It features 320(64x5) SPUs as well as 16 Texture Address Units and 16 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Memory Bandwidth

The GeForce GTX 285 1GB should in theory be just a bit faster than the Radeon HD 3870 X2 1GB overall. (explain)

GeForce GTX 285 1GB		158976 MB/sec
Radeon HD 3870 X2 1GB		144128 MB/sec
	Difference: 14848 (10%)

Texel Rate

The GeForce GTX 285 1GB is much (approximately 96%) faster with regards to texture filtering than the Radeon HD 3870 X2 1GB. (explain)

GeForce GTX 285 1GB		51840 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 3870 X2 1GB		26400 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 25440 (96%)

Pixel Rate

If using a high screen resolution is important to you, then the Radeon HD 3870 X2 1GB is the winner, by a large margin. (explain)

Radeon HD 3870 X2 1GB		26400 Mpixels/sec
GeForce GTX 285 1GB		20736 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 5664 (27%)

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.

One or more cards in this comparison are multi-core. This means that their bandwidth, texel and pixel rates are theoretically doubled - this does not mean the card will actually perform twice as fast, but only that it should in theory be able to. Actual game benchmarks will give a more accurate idea of what it's capable of.

Price Comparison

Specifications

Memory Bandwidth: Bandwidth is the largest amount of data (in units of megabytes per second) that can be transported past the external memory interface in a second. It is worked out by multiplying the bus width by the speed of its memory. If it uses DDR memory, it must be multiplied by 2 again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher the 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 are applied in one second. This number is worked out by multiplying the total texture units by the core speed of the chip. The better the texel rate, the better the card will be at handling texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels in a second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels that the graphics card can possibly record to the local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is worked out by multiplying the number of Render Output Units by the the core speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also sometimes called Render Output Units) are responsible for drawing the pixels (image) on the screen. The actual pixel rate also depends on many other factors, especially the memory bandwidth - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to get to the max fill rate.