Radeon HD 3870 X2 1GB vs Radeon HD 5750 512MB

Intro

Compare those specifications to the Radeon HD 5750 512MB, which comes with clock speeds of 700 MHz on the GPU, and 1150 MHz on the 512 MB of GDDR5 RAM. It features 720(144x5) SPUs as well as 36 TAUs and 16 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Memory Bandwidth

As far as performance goes, the Radeon HD 3870 X2 1GB should theoretically be much superior to the Radeon HD 5750 512MB overall. (explain)

Radeon HD 3870 X2 1GB		144128 MB/sec
Radeon HD 5750 512MB		73600 MB/sec
	Difference: 70528 (96%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 3870 X2 1GB is a bit (more or less 5%) more effective at anisotropic filtering than the Radeon HD 5750 512MB. (explain)

Radeon HD 3870 X2 1GB		26400 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 5750 512MB		25200 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 1200 (5%)

Pixel Rate

If using high levels of AA is important to you, then the Radeon HD 3870 X2 1GB is superior to the Radeon HD 5750 512MB, and very much so. (explain)

Radeon HD 3870 X2 1GB		26400 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 5750 512MB		11200 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 15200 (136%)

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: Memory bandwidth is the largest amount of information (measured in megabytes per second) that can be transferred across the external memory interface in a second. It's calculated by multiplying the interface width by its memory speed. If the card has DDR type RAM, the result should be multiplied by 2 once again. If DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The better the bandwidth is, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, High Dynamic Range and high resolutions.

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

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels that the graphics chip could possibly record to the local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is calculated by multiplying the amount of ROPs by the the core clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - aka Render Output Units) are responsible for filling the screen with pixels (the image). The actual pixel rate is also dependant on quite a few other factors, especially the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the potential to reach the max fill rate.