Radeon HD 3870 X2 1GB vs Radeon HD 7950 3GB

Intro

Compare those specifications to the Radeon HD 7950 3GB, which has core speeds of 800 MHz on the GPU, and 1250 MHz on the 3072 MB of GDDR5 RAM. It features 1792 SPUs along with 112 Texture Address Units and 32 Rasterization Operator Units.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically speaking, the Radeon HD 7950 3GB will be 67% faster than the Radeon HD 3870 X2 1GB in general, because of its greater data rate. (explain)

Radeon HD 7950 3GB		240000 MB/sec
Radeon HD 3870 X2 1GB		144128 MB/sec
	Difference: 95872 (67%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 7950 3GB will be quite a bit (approximately 239%) better at texture filtering than the Radeon HD 3870 X2 1GB. (explain)

Radeon HD 7950 3GB		89600 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 3870 X2 1GB		26400 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 63200 (239%)

Pixel Rate

If running with lots of anti-aliasing is important to you, then the Radeon HD 3870 X2 1GB is the winner, but it probably won't make a huge difference. (explain)

Radeon HD 3870 X2 1GB		26400 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 7950 3GB		25600 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 800 (3%)

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 largest amount of information (measured in megabytes per second) that can be moved past the external memory interface within a second. It's calculated by multiplying the card's interface width by the speed of its memory. In the case of DDR type memory, the result should be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The better the bandwidth is, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, HDR and high resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum amount of texture map elements (texels) that can be applied per second. This number is calculated by multiplying the total number of texture units of the card by the core speed of the chip. The better this number, 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 number of pixels the graphics card could possibly write to the local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is calculated by multiplying the number of colour ROPs by the clock speed of the card. 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 is also dependant on lots of other factors, especially the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to reach the maximum fill rate.