GeForce 9800 GT 512MB vs Radeon HD 3870 1GB

Intro

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

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce 9800 GT 512MB		105 Watts
Radeon HD 3870 1GB		106 Watts
	Difference: 1 Watts (1%)

Memory Bandwidth

Performance-wise, the Radeon HD 3870 1GB should in theory be much superior to the GeForce 9800 GT 512MB overall. (explain)

Radeon HD 3870 1GB		72000 MB/sec
GeForce 9800 GT 512MB		57600 MB/sec
	Difference: 14400 (25%)

Texel Rate

The GeForce 9800 GT 512MB is much (approximately 171%) better at texture filtering than the Radeon HD 3870 1GB. (explain)

GeForce 9800 GT 512MB		33600 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 3870 1GB		12400 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 21200 (171%)

Pixel Rate

If running with high levels of AA is important to you, then the Radeon HD 3870 1GB is superior to the GeForce 9800 GT 512MB, by a large margin. (explain)

Radeon HD 3870 1GB		12400 Mpixels/sec
GeForce 9800 GT 512MB		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: Memory bandwidth is the largest amount of information (in units of megabytes per second) that can be transferred across the external memory interface in one second. It is worked out by multiplying the card's bus width by its memory speed. If it uses DDR memory, the result should be multiplied by 2 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 processed in one second. This is calculated by multiplying the total number of texture units of the card by the core clock speed of the chip. The higher the texel rate, the better the card will be at handling texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels per second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels the graphics card could possibly record to its local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is worked out by multiplying the number of Raster Operations Pipelines by the the core speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also sometimes called Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel fill rate is also dependant on lots of other factors, especially the memory bandwidth - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the ability to reach the max fill rate.