Radeon HD 3870 1GB vs Radeon HD 6770

Intro

Compare those specs to the Radeon HD 6770, which makes use of a 40 nm design. AMD has clocked the core speed at 900 MHz. The GDDR5 RAM is set to run at a frequency of 1050 MHz on this specific model. It features 800 SPUs as well as 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 1GB		106 Watts
Radeon HD 6770		108 Watts
	Difference: 2 Watts (2%)

Memory Bandwidth

The Radeon HD 3870 1GB should theoretically be just a bit faster than the Radeon HD 6770 overall. (explain)

Radeon HD 3870 1GB		72000 MB/sec
Radeon HD 6770		67200 MB/sec
	Difference: 4800 (7%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 6770 should be a lot (approximately 190%) faster with regards to anisotropic filtering than the Radeon HD 3870 1GB. (explain)

Radeon HD 6770		36000 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 3870 1GB		12400 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 23600 (190%)

Pixel Rate

If using lots of anti-aliasing is important to you, then the Radeon HD 6770 is the winner, but only just. (explain)

Radeon HD 6770		14400 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 3870 1GB		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 maximum amount of information (in units of megabytes per second) that can be transferred over the external memory interface in a second. It is calculated by multiplying the interface width by its memory speed. In the case of DDR type memory, the result should be multiplied by 2 again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher the card's memory bandwidth, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, High Dynamic Range and higher screen resolutions.

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

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum amount of pixels that the graphics card can possibly write to the local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is calculated by multiplying the amount of colour ROPs 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 rate also depends on quite a few other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the potential to reach the max fill rate.