GeForce GTX 285 2GB vs Radeon HD 7870 XT

Intro

Compare that to the Radeon HD 7870 XT, which has a core clock speed of 925 MHz and a GDDR5 memory frequency of 1500 MHz. It also uses a 256-bit memory bus, and uses a 28 nm design. It features 1536 SPUs, 96 TAUs, 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 2GB		204 Watts
	Difference: 19 Watts (10%)

Memory Bandwidth

The Radeon HD 7870 XT, in theory, should be a lot faster than the GeForce GTX 285 2GB in general. (explain)

Radeon HD 7870 XT		192000 MB/sec
GeForce GTX 285 2GB		158976 MB/sec
	Difference: 33024 (21%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 7870 XT will be quite a bit (approximately 71%) more effective at anisotropic filtering than the GeForce GTX 285 2GB. (explain)

Radeon HD 7870 XT		88800 Mtexels/sec
GeForce GTX 285 2GB		51840 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 36960 (71%)

Pixel Rate

If using lots of anti-aliasing is important to you, then the Radeon HD 7870 XT is the winner, by a large margin. (explain)

Radeon HD 7870 XT		29600 Mpixels/sec
GeForce GTX 285 2GB		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: Memory bandwidth is the largest amount of information (in units of megabytes per second) that can be transferred over the external memory interface within a second. It's calculated by multiplying the bus width by its memory clock speed. If the card has DDR type memory, it must be multiplied by 2 again. If DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The better the bandwidth is, the better 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 processed in one second. This is worked out by multiplying the total number of texture units by the core clock speed of the chip. The higher this number, 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 maximum amount of pixels that the graphics card can possibly write to the local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is calculated by multiplying the amount of Raster Operations Pipelines by the the card's clock speed. 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 rate is also dependant on quite a few other factors, especially the memory bandwidth - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to get to the maximum fill rate.