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

Intro

Compare those specs to the Radeon HD 6670 (OEM) 1GB, which makes use of a 40 nm design. AMD has clocked the core speed at 800 MHz. The GDDR5 memory works at a frequency of 1000 MHz on this particular card. It features 480 SPUs as well as 24 Texture Address Units and 8 ROPs.

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) 1GB in general, because of its higher data rate. (explain)

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

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 3870 X2 1GB will be quite a bit (approximately 38%) faster with regards to texture filtering than the Radeon HD 6670 (OEM) 1GB. (explain)

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

Pixel Rate

If running with lots of anti-aliasing is important to you, then the Radeon HD 3870 X2 1GB is the winner, by far. (explain)

Radeon HD 3870 X2 1GB		26400 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 6670 (OEM) 1GB		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: Bandwidth is the largest amount of information (measured in MB per second) that can be transported across the external memory interface in a second. The number is calculated by multiplying the card's bus width by its memory clock speed. If it uses DDR RAM, it should be multiplied by 2 once again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher the memory bandwidth, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, HDR and high resolutions.

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

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum amount of pixels that the graphics chip can possibly write to the local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is calculated by multiplying the number of Render Output Units by the the core clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - sometimes also referred to as Render Output Units) are responsible for drawing the pixels (image) on the screen. The actual pixel fill rate is also dependant on many other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the potential to get to the max fill rate.