GeForce GTX 285 2GB vs Radeon HD 7870 XT

Intro

Compare that to the Radeon HD 7870 XT, which makes use of a 28 nm design. AMD has clocked the core frequency at 925 MHz. The GDDR5 RAM runs at a frequency of 1500 MHz on this specific model. It features 1536 SPUs as well as 96 Texture Address Units and 32 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon HD 7870 XT		185 Watts
GeForce GTX 285 2GB		204 Watts
	Difference: 19 Watts (10%)

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically speaking, the Radeon HD 7870 XT is 21% faster than the GeForce GTX 285 2GB overall, because of its greater bandwidth. (explain)

Radeon HD 7870 XT		192000 MB/sec
GeForce GTX 285 2GB		158976 MB/sec
	Difference: 33024 (21%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 7870 XT will be quite a bit (about 71%) faster with regards to texture filtering than the GeForce GTX 285 2GB. (explain)

Radeon HD 7870 XT		88800 Mtexels/sec
GeForce GTX 285 2GB		51840 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 36960 (71%)

Pixel Rate

If using high levels of AA is important to you, then the Radeon HD 7870 XT is a better choice, by a large margin. (explain)

Radeon HD 7870 XT		29600 Mpixels/sec
GeForce GTX 285 2GB		20736 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 8864 (43%)

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 moved past the external memory interface within a second. It is calculated by multiplying the interface width by the speed of its memory. In the case of DDR type memory, the result should be multiplied by 2 once again. If DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The higher the card's memory bandwidth, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, HDR and high resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum amount of texture map elements (texels) that can be applied per second. This figure is worked out by multiplying the total number of texture units by the core clock speed of the chip. The higher this number, the better the card will be at handling texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels processed in a second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels that the graphics card can possibly write to its local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is worked out by multiplying the number of Render Output Units 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 is also dependant on quite a few other factors, especially the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the ability to reach the max fill rate.