GeForce 9800 GTX+ vs Radeon HD 3870 512MB

Intro

The GeForce 9800 GTX+ has a clock speed of 738 MHz and a GDDR3 memory frequency of 1100 MHz. It also uses a 256-bit memory bus, and makes use of a 55 nm design. It is made up of 128 SPUs, 64 TAUs, and 16 ROPs.

Compare those specs to the Radeon HD 3870 512MB, which features core clock speeds of 775 MHz on the GPU, and 900 MHz on the 512 MB of GDDR3 memory. It features 320(64x5) SPUs as well as 16 Texture Address Units and 16 Rasterization Operator Units.

Price Comparison

Specifications

Memory Bandwidth: Memory bandwidth is the max amount of data (counted in megabytes per second) that can be transported across the external memory interface within a second. It is worked out by multiplying the card's interface width by its memory clock speed. If the card has DDR RAM, the result should be multiplied by 2 again. If DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The higher the card's memory bandwidth, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, High Dynamic Range and higher screen resolutions.

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

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum number of pixels that the graphics card can possibly record to the local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is worked out by multiplying the number of Raster Operations Pipelines by the the core clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - sometimes also referred to as Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel output rate also depends on lots of other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the potential to reach the maximum fill rate.