Geforce GTX 770 vs Radeon HD 3870 X2 1GB

Intro

Compare those specifications to the Radeon HD 3870 X2 1GB, which has a clock speed of 825 MHz and a GDDR4 memory speed of 1126 MHz. It also uses a 256-bit memory bus, and uses a 55 nm design. It is comprised of 320(64x5) SPUs, 16 TAUs, and 16 Raster Operation Units.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically, the Geforce GTX 770 should perform much faster than the Radeon HD 3870 X2 1GB overall. (explain)

Geforce GTX 770		224384 MB/sec
Radeon HD 3870 X2 1GB		144128 MB/sec
	Difference: 80256 (56%)

Texel Rate

The Geforce GTX 770 is a lot (more or less 407%) more effective at anisotropic filtering than the Radeon HD 3870 X2 1GB. (explain)

Geforce GTX 770		133888 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 3870 X2 1GB		26400 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 107488 (407%)

Pixel Rate

The Geforce GTX 770 is much (about 27%) more effective at FSAA than the Radeon HD 3870 X2 1GB, and should be able to handle higher resolutions while still performing well. (explain)

Geforce GTX 770		33472 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 3870 X2 1GB		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 (measured in MB per second) that can be transferred over the external memory interface in a second. The number is worked out by multiplying the bus width by its memory speed. In the case of DDR memory, the result should be multiplied by 2 again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The better the memory bandwidth, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, High Dynamic Range and higher screen resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum texture map elements (texels) that are processed in one second. This number is calculated by multiplying the total texture units 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 processed in a second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum number of pixels that the graphics chip can possibly record to its local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is calculated by multiplying the number of colour ROPs by the the core speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also called Render Output Units) are responsible for filling the screen with pixels (the image). The actual pixel fill rate is also dependant on quite a few other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the ability to reach the max fill rate.