GeForce GTX 650 Ti vs Radeon HD 3870 512MB

Intro

Compare those specs to the Radeon HD 3870 512MB, which features core clock speeds of 775 MHz on the GPU, and 900 MHz on the 512 MB of GDDR3 RAM. It features 320(64x5) SPUs as well as 16 Texture Address Units and 16 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon HD 3870 512MB		106 Watts
GeForce GTX 650 Ti		110 Watts
	Difference: 4 Watts (4%)

Memory Bandwidth

As far as performance goes, the GeForce GTX 650 Ti should in theory be a lot superior to the Radeon HD 3870 512MB in general. (explain)

GeForce GTX 650 Ti		86400 MB/sec
Radeon HD 3870 512MB		57600 MB/sec
	Difference: 28800 (50%)

Texel Rate

The GeForce GTX 650 Ti is quite a bit (approximately 379%) better at anisotropic filtering than the Radeon HD 3870 512MB. (explain)

GeForce GTX 650 Ti		59392 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 3870 512MB		12400 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 46992 (379%)

Pixel Rate

The GeForce GTX 650 Ti is a little bit (approximately 20%) faster with regards to full screen anti-aliasing than the Radeon HD 3870 512MB, and also able to handle higher resolutions better. (explain)

GeForce GTX 650 Ti		14848 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 3870 512MB		12400 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 2448 (20%)

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 data (in units of megabytes per second) that can be moved across the external memory interface in one second. It's calculated by multiplying the card's interface width by its memory speed. If the card has DDR memory, it must be multiplied by 2 once again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The higher the card's memory bandwidth, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, HDR and higher screen resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum amount of texture map elements (texels) that are processed in one second. This figure is worked out by multiplying the total amount of texture units by the core speed of the chip. The higher the texel rate, the better the video 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 amount of pixels that the graphics card could possibly record to the local memory in a 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 filling the screen with pixels (the image). The actual pixel output rate is also dependant on lots of other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to get to the maximum fill rate.