GeForce GT 220 GDDR3 vs Radeon HD 7870

Intro

Compare those specifications to the Radeon HD 7870, which makes use of a 28 nm design. AMD has set the core speed at 1000 MHz. The GDDR5 memory works at a speed of 1200 MHz on this specific card. It features 1280 SPUs along with 80 TAUs and 32 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce GT 220 GDDR3		58 Watts
Radeon HD 7870		175 Watts
	Difference: 117 Watts (202%)

Memory Bandwidth

In theory, the Radeon HD 7870 will be 374% faster than the GeForce GT 220 GDDR3 in general, because of its higher bandwidth. (explain)

Radeon HD 7870		153600 MB/sec
GeForce GT 220 GDDR3		32384 MB/sec
	Difference: 121216 (374%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 7870 will be quite a bit (approximately 700%) more effective at anisotropic filtering than the GeForce GT 220 GDDR3. (explain)

Radeon HD 7870		80000 Mtexels/sec
GeForce GT 220 GDDR3		10000 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 70000 (700%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon HD 7870 is much (approximately 540%) more effective at full screen anti-aliasing than the GeForce GT 220 GDDR3, and also able to handle higher resolutions without slowing down too much. (explain)

Radeon HD 7870		32000 Mpixels/sec
GeForce GT 220 GDDR3		5000 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 27000 (540%)

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 largest amount of information (in units of MB per second) that can be transported across the external memory interface in one second. It's calculated by multiplying the card's interface width by its memory speed. If it uses DDR memory, it must be multiplied by 2 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 AA, HDR and high resolutions.

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

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum number of pixels that the graphics chip could possibly write to its local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is worked out by multiplying the amount of ROPs by the clock speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also called Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel fill rate also depends on many other factors, especially the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the ability to get to the max fill rate.