GeForce GTX 780 Ti vs Radeon HD 3870 X2 512MB

Intro

Compare all that to the Radeon HD 3870 X2 512MB, which comes with GPU 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 Texture Address Units, and 16 ROPs.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically speaking, the GeForce GTX 780 Ti should perform quite a bit faster than the Radeon HD 3870 X2 512MB overall. (explain)

GeForce GTX 780 Ti		336000 MB/sec
Radeon HD 3870 X2 512MB		115200 MB/sec
	Difference: 220800 (192%)

Texel Rate

The GeForce GTX 780 Ti is a lot (more or less 695%) better at AF than the Radeon HD 3870 X2 512MB. (explain)

GeForce GTX 780 Ti		210000 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 3870 X2 512MB		26400 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 183600 (695%)

Pixel Rate

The GeForce GTX 780 Ti will be a lot (more or less 59%) better at full screen anti-aliasing than the Radeon HD 3870 X2 512MB, and will be capable of handling higher screen resolutions better. (explain)

GeForce GTX 780 Ti		42000 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 3870 X2 512MB		26400 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 15600 (59%)

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 largest amount of data (in units of MB per second) that can be transported across the external memory interface within a second. The number is worked out by multiplying the bus width by the speed of its memory. In the case of DDR type RAM, it should be multiplied by 2 once again. If DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The higher the bandwidth is, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, HDR and high resolutions.

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

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum number of pixels that the graphics chip could possibly record to the local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is calculated by multiplying the number of colour ROPs by the the core clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also called Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel rate also depends on many other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the potential to get to the maximum fill rate.