Radeon HD 3870 512MB vs Radeon HD 5570

Intro

Compare that to the Radeon HD 5570, which has GPU clock speed of 650 MHz, and 512 MB of DDR3 memory running at 900 MHz through a 128-bit bus. It also is made up of 400(80x5) Stream Processors, 20 Texture Address Units, and 8 Raster Operation Units.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon HD 5570		43 Watts
Radeon HD 3870 512MB		106 Watts
	Difference: 63 Watts (147%)

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically, the Radeon HD 3870 512MB should perform much faster than the Radeon HD 5570 overall. (explain)

Radeon HD 3870 512MB		57600 MB/sec
Radeon HD 5570		28800 MB/sec
	Difference: 28800 (100%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 5570 is a small bit (about 5%) faster with regards to anisotropic filtering than the Radeon HD 3870 512MB. (explain)

Radeon HD 5570		13000 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 3870 512MB		12400 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 600 (5%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon HD 3870 512MB is quite a bit (more or less 138%) better at anti-aliasing than the Radeon HD 5570, and will be capable of handling higher resolutions without losing too much performance. (explain)

Radeon HD 3870 512MB		12400 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 5570		5200 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 7200 (138%)

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 data (counted in MB per second) that can be moved across the external memory interface in a second. It's calculated by multiplying the bus width by its memory speed. If the card has DDR type RAM, it should be multiplied by 2 once again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The higher the memory bandwidth, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, HDR and higher screen resolutions.

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

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