GeForce GTX 750 vs Radeon HD 3870 512MB

Intro

Compare that to the Radeon HD 3870 512MB, which comes with clock speeds of 775 MHz on the GPU, and 900 MHz on the 512 MB of GDDR3 memory. It features 320(64x5) SPUs along with 16 TAUs and 16 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce GTX 750		55 Watts
Radeon HD 3870 512MB		106 Watts
	Difference: 51 Watts (93%)

Memory Bandwidth

The GeForce GTX 750 should in theory be quite a bit faster than the Radeon HD 3870 512MB in general. (explain)

GeForce GTX 750		80000 MB/sec
Radeon HD 3870 512MB		57600 MB/sec
	Difference: 22400 (39%)

Texel Rate

The GeForce GTX 750 will be quite a bit (about 163%) faster with regards to anisotropic filtering than the Radeon HD 3870 512MB. (explain)

GeForce GTX 750		32640 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 3870 512MB		12400 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 20240 (163%)

Pixel Rate

If using a high resolution is important to you, then the GeForce GTX 750 is a better choice, by far. (explain)

GeForce GTX 750		16320 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 3870 512MB		12400 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 3920 (32%)

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 (measured in megabytes per second) that can be transferred over the external memory interface within a second. It's calculated by multiplying the bus width by its memory clock speed. If the card has DDR RAM, it must be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The better the bandwidth is, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, HDR and high resolutions.

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

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum number of pixels the graphics card could possibly write to its local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is calculated by multiplying the number of ROPs by the the card's clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also called Render Output Units) are responsible for drawing the pixels (image) on the screen. The actual pixel fill rate is also dependant on quite a few other factors, especially the memory bandwidth - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the potential to get to the max fill rate.