GeForce GT 1030 vs Radeon HD 3870 X2 1GB

Intro

Compare those specifications to the Radeon HD 3870 X2 1GB, which uses a 55 nm design. AMD has set the core speed at 825 MHz. The GDDR4 memory works at a frequency of 1126 MHz on this particular card. It features 320(64x5) SPUs along with 16 Texture Address Units and 16 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically, the Radeon HD 3870 X2 1GB should perform much faster than the GeForce GT 1030 in general. (explain)

Radeon HD 3870 X2 1GB		144128 MB/sec
GeForce GT 1030		49152 MB/sec
	Difference: 94976 (193%)

Texel Rate

The GeForce GT 1030 will be quite a bit (approximately 53%) better at AF than the Radeon HD 3870 X2 1GB. (explain)

GeForce GT 1030		40480 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 3870 X2 1GB		26400 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 14080 (53%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon HD 3870 X2 1GB will be a lot (about 30%) faster with regards to full screen anti-aliasing than the GeForce GT 1030, and will be able to handle higher resolutions better. (explain)

Radeon HD 3870 X2 1GB		26400 Mpixels/sec
GeForce GT 1030		20240 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 6160 (30%)

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: Bandwidth is the largest amount of data (measured in megabytes per second) that can be transported over the external memory interface within a second. It is calculated by multiplying the bus width by the speed of its memory. In the case of DDR RAM, the result should be multiplied by 2 again. If DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The higher the memory bandwidth, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, HDR and high resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum amount of texture map elements (texels) that can be processed per second. This number is worked out by multiplying the total texture units of the card by the core clock 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 applied per second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum number of pixels the video card can possibly write to the local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is worked out by multiplying the number of Render Output Units by the the core 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 lots of other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the potential to get to the maximum fill rate.