Radeon HD 3870 512MB vs Radeon HD 5670

Intro

The Radeon HD 3870 512MB comes with a GPU core speed of 775 MHz, and the 512 MB of GDDR3 RAM runs at 900 MHz through a 256-bit bus. It also features 320(64x5) Stream Processors, 16 Texture Address Units, and 16 Raster Operation Units.

Compare those specs to the Radeon HD 5670, which comes with a core clock speed of 775 MHz and a GDDR5 memory speed of 1000 MHz. It also uses a 128-bit memory bus, and makes use of a 40 nm design. It is comprised of 400(80x5) SPUs, 20 TAUs, and 8 Raster Operation Units.

Price Comparison

Please note that the price comparisons are based on search keywords, and might not be the exact same card listed on this page. We have no control over the accuracy of their search results.

Radeon HD 3870 512MB Amazon.com Other US-based stores Amazon.co.uk Amazon.de Amazon.fr

Radeon HD 5670 Amazon.com Other US-based stores Amazon.co.uk Amazon.de Amazon.fr

Specifications

Model	Radeon HD 3870 512MB	Radeon HD 5670
Manufacturer	ATi	ATi
Year	Nov 19, 2007	January 14, 2010
Code Name	RV670 XT	Redwood XT
Fab Process	55 nm	40 nm
Bus	PCIe 2.0 x16/AGP 8x	PCIe 2.1 x16
Memory	512 MB	1024 MB
Core Speed	775 MHz	775 MHz
Shader Speed	N/A MHz	(N/A) MHz
Memory Speed	900 MHz	1000 MHz
Unified Shaders	320(64x5)	400(80x5)
Texture Mapping Units	16	20
Render Output Units	16	8
Bus Type	GDDR3	GDDR5
Bus Width	256-bit	128-bit
DirectX Version	DirectX 10.1	DirectX 11
OpenGL Version	OpenGL 3.0	OpenGL 3.2
Power (Max TDP)	106 watts	61 watts
Shader Model	4.1	5.0
Bandwidth	57600 MB/sec	64000 MB/sec
Texel Rate	12400 Mtexels/sec	15500 Mtexels/sec
Pixel Rate	12400 Mpixels/sec	6200 Mpixels/sec

Memory Bandwidth: Bandwidth is the largest amount of data (counted in megabytes 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 type memory, the result should be multiplied by 2 again. If DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The better the card's memory bandwidth, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, High Dynamic Range and high resolutions.

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

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum amount of pixels the graphics card can possibly record to its local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is calculated by multiplying the number of ROPs by the the core speed of the card. 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 output rate is also dependant on quite a few other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the ability to reach the max fill rate.