Radeon HD 3870 1GB vs Radeon HD 6770

Intro

Compare all that to the Radeon HD 6770, which uses a 40 nm design. AMD has clocked the core speed at 900 MHz. The GDDR5 RAM works at a frequency of 1050 MHz on this card. It features 800 SPUs as well as 40 Texture Address Units and 16 Rasterization Operator Units.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon HD 3870 1GB		106 Watts
Radeon HD 6770		108 Watts
	Difference: 2 Watts (2%)

Memory Bandwidth

As far as performance goes, the Radeon HD 3870 1GB should theoretically be a small bit superior to the Radeon HD 6770 in general. (explain)

Radeon HD 3870 1GB		72000 MB/sec
Radeon HD 6770		67200 MB/sec
	Difference: 4800 (7%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 6770 should be quite a bit (more or less 190%) faster with regards to AF than the Radeon HD 3870 1GB. (explain)

Radeon HD 6770		36000 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 3870 1GB		12400 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 23600 (190%)

Pixel Rate

If running with a high screen resolution is important to you, then the Radeon HD 6770 is the winner, but not by far. (explain)

Radeon HD 6770		14400 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 3870 1GB		12400 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 2000 (16%)

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 largest amount of information (measured in MB per second) that can be transported over the external memory interface in a second. It's worked out by multiplying the interface width by its memory speed. In the case of DDR memory, it must be multiplied by 2 once again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher the memory bandwidth, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, HDR and higher screen resolutions.

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

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels that the graphics card can possibly record to its local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is calculated by multiplying the amount of Render Output Units by the clock speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - aka Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel fill rate is also dependant on quite a few other factors, especially the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the ability to reach the max fill rate.