Radeon HD 3870 512MB vs Radeon HD 6770

Intro

Compare those specs to the Radeon HD 6770, which comes with core clock speeds of 900 MHz on the GPU, and 1050 MHz on the 512 MB of GDDR5 RAM. It features 800 SPUs along with 40 Texture Address Units and 16 Rasterization Operator Units.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon HD 3870 512MB		106 Watts
Radeon HD 6770		108 Watts
	Difference: 2 Watts (2%)

Memory Bandwidth

The Radeon HD 6770 should in theory be a small bit faster than the Radeon HD 3870 512MB in general. (explain)

Radeon HD 6770		67200 MB/sec
Radeon HD 3870 512MB		57600 MB/sec
	Difference: 9600 (17%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 6770 is much (more or less 190%) more effective at anisotropic filtering than the Radeon HD 3870 512MB. (explain)

Radeon HD 6770		36000 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 3870 512MB		12400 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 23600 (190%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon HD 6770 is a bit (approximately 16%) more effective at AA than the Radeon HD 3870 512MB, and also will be able to handle higher screen resolutions more effectively. (explain)

Radeon HD 6770		14400 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 3870 512MB		12400 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 2000 (16%)

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 max amount of information (counted in MB per second) that can be transferred over the external memory interface in one second. It is worked out by multiplying the interface width by the speed of its memory. In the case of DDR type RAM, the result should be multiplied by 2 once again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher the card's memory bandwidth, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, High Dynamic Range and high resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum texture map elements (texels) that can be processed in one second. This figure is calculated by multiplying the total amount of texture units by the core clock speed of the chip. The better this number, the better the video card will be at texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels applied in a second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum number of pixels the graphics card could possibly record to its local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is calculated by multiplying the number of Render Output Units by the the card's clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - sometimes also referred to as Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel output rate also depends on many other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the ability to get to the maximum fill rate.