GeForce GTS 450 vs Radeon HD 3870 512MB

Intro

Compare all of that to the Radeon HD 3870 512MB, which comes with a GPU core clock speed of 775 MHz, and 512 MB of GDDR3 memory running at 900 MHz through a 256-bit bus. It also is comprised of 320(64x5) Stream Processors, 16 Texture Address Units, and 16 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Both cards have the same power consumption.

Memory Bandwidth

As far as performance goes, the GeForce GTS 450 should in theory be a little bit better than the Radeon HD 3870 512MB overall. (explain)

GeForce GTS 450		57728 MB/sec
Radeon HD 3870 512MB		57600 MB/sec
	Difference: 128 (0%)

Texel Rate

The GeForce GTS 450 will be quite a bit (approximately 102%) faster with regards to anisotropic filtering than the Radeon HD 3870 512MB. (explain)

GeForce GTS 450		25056 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 3870 512MB		12400 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 12656 (102%)

Pixel Rate

If using a high screen resolution is important to you, then the GeForce GTS 450 is the winner, though not by far. (explain)

GeForce GTS 450		12528 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 3870 512MB		12400 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 128 (1%)

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 (in units of megabytes per second) that can be transferred across the external memory interface within a second. It's worked out 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 again. If DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The higher the bandwidth is, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, HDR and high resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum texture map elements (texels) that can be processed per second. This figure is calculated by multiplying the total texture units of the card by the core clock speed of the chip. The higher this number, the better the graphics card will be at 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 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 amount of Raster Operations Pipelines 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 is also dependant on many other factors, especially the memory bandwidth - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the ability to reach the max fill rate.