Geforce GTX 770 vs Radeon HD 3870 X2 512MB

Intro

Compare that to the Radeon HD 3870 X2 512MB, which features a GPU core clock speed of 825 MHz, and 512 MB of GDDR3 RAM running at 900 MHz through a 256-bit bus. It also features 320(64x5) Stream Processors, 16 TAUs, and 16 Raster Operation Units.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically speaking, the Geforce GTX 770 should be 95% quicker than the Radeon HD 3870 X2 512MB in general, due to its greater bandwidth. (explain)

Geforce GTX 770		224384 MB/sec
Radeon HD 3870 X2 512MB		115200 MB/sec
	Difference: 109184 (95%)

Texel Rate

The Geforce GTX 770 will be a lot (approximately 407%) faster with regards to texture filtering than the Radeon HD 3870 X2 512MB. (explain)

Geforce GTX 770		133888 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 3870 X2 512MB		26400 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 107488 (407%)

Pixel Rate

The Geforce GTX 770 will be quite a bit (approximately 27%) faster with regards to FSAA than the Radeon HD 3870 X2 512MB, and will be capable of handling higher resolutions without slowing down too much. (explain)

Geforce GTX 770		33472 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 3870 X2 512MB		26400 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 7072 (27%)

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 max amount of information (in units of MB per second) that can be moved over the external memory interface within a second. It is worked out by multiplying the bus width by the speed of its memory. If the card has DDR type memory, it should be multiplied by 2 once again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The higher the bandwidth is, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, High Dynamic Range and higher screen resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum texture map elements (texels) that can be applied in one second. This number is calculated by multiplying the total number of texture units of the card by the core clock speed of the chip. The better this number, 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 the graphics card could possibly write to the local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is worked out by multiplying the number of ROPs by the the core 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 quite a few other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to reach the max fill rate.