GeForce GTX 295 vs Radeon HD 3870 X2 512MB

Intro

Compare all of that to the Radeon HD 3870 X2 512MB, which features a clock speed of 825 MHz and a GDDR3 memory frequency of 900 MHz. It also makes use of a 256-bit bus, and uses a 55 nm design. It is made up of 320(64x5) SPUs, 16 Texture Address Units, and 16 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Memory Bandwidth

As far as performance goes, the GeForce GTX 295 should in theory be much superior to the Radeon HD 3870 X2 512MB overall. (explain)

GeForce GTX 295		223776 MB/sec
Radeon HD 3870 X2 512MB		115200 MB/sec
	Difference: 108576 (94%)

Texel Rate

The GeForce GTX 295 will be a lot (more or less 249%) more effective at anisotropic filtering than the Radeon HD 3870 X2 512MB. (explain)

GeForce GTX 295		92160 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 3870 X2 512MB		26400 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 65760 (249%)

Pixel Rate

If using a high resolution is important to you, then the GeForce GTX 295 is a better choice, and very much so. (explain)

GeForce GTX 295		32256 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 3870 X2 512MB		26400 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 5856 (22%)

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: Memory bandwidth is the max amount of data (measured in megabytes per second) that can be transported over the external memory interface within a second. It is calculated by multiplying the card's bus width by the speed of its memory. If the card has DDR type memory, it should be multiplied by 2 again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher the 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 amount of texture map elements (texels) that can be processed per second. This is worked out by multiplying the total amount of texture units of the card by the core speed of the chip. The better this number, the better the graphics 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 most pixels the video card can possibly record to its local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is calculated by multiplying the amount of ROPs by the the core clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also sometimes called Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel output rate is also dependant on quite a few other factors, especially the memory bandwidth - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to get to the max fill rate.