GeForce 9800 GTX+ vs Radeon HD 3870 X2 512MB

Intro

Compare those specs to the Radeon HD 3870 X2 512MB, which uses a 55 nm design. AMD has clocked the core speed at 825 MHz. The GDDR3 RAM works at a frequency of 900 MHz on this particular card. It features 320(64x5) SPUs along with 16 Texture Address Units and 16 Rasterization Operator Units.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically speaking, the Radeon HD 3870 X2 512MB should perform a lot faster than the GeForce 9800 GTX+ overall. (explain)

Radeon HD 3870 X2 512MB		115200 MB/sec
GeForce 9800 GTX+		70400 MB/sec
	Difference: 44800 (64%)

Texel Rate

The GeForce 9800 GTX+ will be quite a bit (about 79%) more effective at anisotropic filtering than the Radeon HD 3870 X2 512MB. (explain)

GeForce 9800 GTX+		47232 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 3870 X2 512MB		26400 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 20832 (79%)

Pixel Rate

If using a high screen resolution is important to you, then the Radeon HD 3870 X2 512MB is a better choice, by far. (explain)

Radeon HD 3870 X2 512MB		26400 Mpixels/sec
GeForce 9800 GTX+		11808 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 14592 (124%)

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.

One or more cards in this comparison are multi-core. This means that their bandwidth, texel and pixel rates are theoretically doubled - this does not mean the card will actually perform twice as fast, but only that it should in theory be able to. Actual game benchmarks will give a more accurate idea of what it's capable of.

Price Comparison

Specifications

Memory Bandwidth: Bandwidth is the max amount of information (in units of MB per second) that can be moved across the external memory interface in a second. The number is worked out by multiplying the interface width by its memory speed. In the case of DDR type memory, it must be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher the bandwidth is, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, HDR and higher screen resolutions.

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

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum number of pixels that the graphics card could possibly record to its local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is calculated by multiplying the amount of Raster Operations Pipelines by the clock speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also sometimes called Render Output Units) are responsible for drawing the pixels (image) on the screen. The actual pixel rate also depends on lots of other factors, especially the memory bandwidth - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the potential to get to the maximum fill rate.