GeForce GTX Titan Black vs Radeon HD 3870 1GB

Intro

Compare all that to the Radeon HD 3870 1GB, which comes with a core clock frequency of 775 MHz and a GDDR4 memory speed of 1125 MHz. It also uses a 256-bit bus, and uses a 55 nm design. It is comprised of 320(64x5) SPUs, 16 Texture Address Units, and 16 Raster Operation Units.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon HD 3870 1GB		106 Watts
GeForce GTX Titan Black		250 Watts
	Difference: 144 Watts (136%)

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically, the GeForce GTX Titan Black should be quite a bit faster than the Radeon HD 3870 1GB overall. (explain)

GeForce GTX Titan Black		336000 MB/sec
Radeon HD 3870 1GB		72000 MB/sec
	Difference: 264000 (367%)

Texel Rate

The GeForce GTX Titan Black is a lot (about 1621%) faster with regards to AF than the Radeon HD 3870 1GB. (explain)

GeForce GTX Titan Black		213360 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 3870 1GB		12400 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 200960 (1621%)

Pixel Rate

If running with a high resolution is important to you, then the GeForce GTX Titan Black is superior to the Radeon HD 3870 1GB, and very much so. (explain)

GeForce GTX Titan Black		42672 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 3870 1GB		12400 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 30272 (244%)

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: Memory bandwidth is the max amount of data (counted in MB per second) that can be moved over the external memory interface within a second. It's worked out by multiplying the bus width by its memory clock speed. If it uses DDR type RAM, it must be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The better the memory bandwidth, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, HDR and high resolutions.

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

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels that the graphics card could possibly record to the local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is worked out by multiplying the amount of colour ROPs by the clock speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also sometimes called Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel rate is also dependant on many other factors, especially the memory bandwidth - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the ability to get to the maximum fill rate.