Radeon HD 3870 X2 1GB vs Radeon HD 6670 (OEM)

Intro

Compare those specifications to the Radeon HD 6670 (OEM), which comes with clock speeds of 800 MHz on the GPU, and 1000 MHz on the 512 MB of GDDR5 RAM. It features 480 SPUs as well as 24 Texture Address Units and 8 Rasterization Operator Units.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Memory Bandwidth

In theory, the Radeon HD 3870 X2 1GB should be 125% quicker than the Radeon HD 6670 (OEM) in general, due to its greater data rate. (explain)

Radeon HD 3870 X2 1GB		144128 MB/sec
Radeon HD 6670 (OEM)		64000 MB/sec
	Difference: 80128 (125%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 3870 X2 1GB should be much (approximately 38%) more effective at anisotropic filtering than the Radeon HD 6670 (OEM). (explain)

Radeon HD 3870 X2 1GB		26400 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 6670 (OEM)		19200 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 7200 (38%)

Pixel Rate

If using a high screen resolution is important to you, then the Radeon HD 3870 X2 1GB is the winner, by a large margin. (explain)

Radeon HD 3870 X2 1GB		26400 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 6670 (OEM)		6400 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 20000 (313%)

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 information (in units of MB per second) that can be transferred across the external memory interface in a second. It is calculated by multiplying the interface width by its memory speed. If it uses DDR RAM, the result should be multiplied by 2 once again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The better the card's 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 applied in one second. This is calculated by multiplying the total 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 in a second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum number of pixels the video card can possibly record to the local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is worked out by multiplying the number of colour ROPs by the the card's clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also called Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel rate is also dependant on many other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the ability to get to the max fill rate.