GeForce GT 1030 vs Radeon HD 3870 512MB

Intro

Compare all of that 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 TAUs and 16 Rasterization Operator Units.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce GT 1030		30 Watts
Radeon HD 3870 512MB		106 Watts
	Difference: 76 Watts (253%)

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically, the Radeon HD 3870 512MB should perform just a bit faster than the GeForce GT 1030 overall. (explain)

Radeon HD 3870 512MB		57600 MB/sec
GeForce GT 1030		49152 MB/sec
	Difference: 8448 (17%)

Texel Rate

The GeForce GT 1030 should be quite a bit (about 226%) better at anisotropic filtering than the Radeon HD 3870 512MB. (explain)

GeForce GT 1030		40480 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 3870 512MB		12400 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 28080 (226%)

Pixel Rate

The GeForce GT 1030 will be a lot (approximately 63%) better at AA than the Radeon HD 3870 512MB, and capable of handling higher screen resolutions while still performing well. (explain)

GeForce GT 1030		20240 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 3870 512MB		12400 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 7840 (63%)

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 moved across the external memory interface in one second. It's calculated by multiplying the interface width by its memory clock speed. If the card has DDR memory, it should be multiplied by 2 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 amount of texture map elements (texels) that are applied in one second. This figure is worked out by multiplying the total texture units by the core clock speed of the chip. The better this number, the better the graphics card will be at handling texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels per second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum amount of pixels that the graphics chip could possibly record to its local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is calculated by multiplying the number of ROPs by the the card's 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 rate also depends on many other factors, especially the memory bandwidth - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the potential to reach the maximum fill rate.