Radeon HD 3870 X2 512MB vs Radeon HD 4730

Intro

Compare all of that to the Radeon HD 4730, which has clock speeds of 700 MHz on the GPU, and 900 MHz on the 512 MB of GDDR5 RAM. It features 640(128x5) SPUs as well as 32 TAUs and 8 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Memory Bandwidth

In theory, the Radeon HD 3870 X2 512MB is 100% faster than the Radeon HD 4730 overall, due to its higher bandwidth. (explain)

Radeon HD 3870 X2 512MB		115200 MB/sec
Radeon HD 4730		57600 MB/sec
	Difference: 57600 (100%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 3870 X2 512MB should be just a bit (more or less 18%) better at anisotropic filtering than the Radeon HD 4730. (explain)

Radeon HD 3870 X2 512MB		26400 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 4730		22400 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 4000 (18%)

Pixel Rate

If using a high resolution is important to you, then the Radeon HD 3870 X2 512MB is a better choice, and very much so. (explain)

Radeon HD 3870 X2 512MB		26400 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 4730		5600 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 20800 (371%)

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 maximum amount of data (in units of MB per second) that can be moved past the external memory interface within a second. The number is worked out by multiplying the bus width by the speed of its memory. If the card has DDR type memory, it should be multiplied by 2 once again. If it uses 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, HDR and high resolutions.

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

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