GeForce 9800 GT 1GB vs Radeon HD 3870 1GB

Intro

Compare all of that to the Radeon HD 3870 1GB, which uses a 55 nm design. AMD has clocked the core frequency at 775 MHz. The GDDR4 RAM is set to run at a speed of 1125 MHz on this specific card. It features 320(64x5) SPUs as well as 16 Texture Address Units and 16 Rasterization Operator Units.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce 9800 GT 1GB		105 Watts
Radeon HD 3870 1GB		106 Watts
	Difference: 1 Watts (1%)

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically speaking, the Radeon HD 3870 1GB should perform much faster than the GeForce 9800 GT 1GB overall. (explain)

Radeon HD 3870 1GB		72000 MB/sec
GeForce 9800 GT 1GB		57600 MB/sec
	Difference: 14400 (25%)

Texel Rate

The GeForce 9800 GT 1GB will be much (approximately 171%) better at AF than the Radeon HD 3870 1GB. (explain)

GeForce 9800 GT 1GB		33600 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 3870 1GB		12400 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 21200 (171%)

Pixel Rate

If running with a high screen resolution is important to you, then the Radeon HD 3870 1GB is a better choice, by a large margin. (explain)

Radeon HD 3870 1GB		12400 Mpixels/sec
GeForce 9800 GT 1GB		9600 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 2800 (29%)

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 (counted in MB per second) that can be transported across the external memory interface within a second. The number is calculated by multiplying the card's bus width by its memory clock speed. If it uses DDR memory, the result should be multiplied by 2 once again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. 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 processed per second. This number is calculated by multiplying the total amount of texture units of the card 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 applied in a second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels that the graphics card could possibly write to its local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is worked out by multiplying the number of Raster Operations Pipelines by the the card's clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also called Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel rate is also dependant on lots of other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the potential to get to the maximum fill rate.