GeForce GTX 285 1GB vs Radeon HD 3870 X2 1GB

Intro

The GeForce GTX 285 1GB has a clock frequency of 648 MHz and a GDDR3 memory speed of 1242 MHz. It also features a 512-bit memory bus, and makes use of a 55 nm design. It is made up of 240 SPUs, 80 TAUs, and 32 ROPs.

Compare all of that to the Radeon HD 3870 X2 1GB, which comes with core speeds of 825 MHz on the GPU, and 1126 MHz on the 1024 MB of GDDR4 RAM. It features 320(64x5) SPUs along with 16 TAUs and 16 Rasterization Operator Units.

Price Comparison

Please note that the price comparisons are based on search keywords, and might not be the exact same card listed on this page. We have no control over the accuracy of their search results.

GeForce GTX 285 1GB Amazon.com Other US-based stores Amazon.co.uk Amazon.de Amazon.fr

Radeon HD 3870 X2 1GB Amazon.com Other US-based stores Amazon.co.uk Amazon.de Amazon.fr

Specifications

Model	GeForce GTX 285 1GB	Radeon HD 3870 X2 1GB
Manufacturer	nVidia	ATi
Year	January 15, 2009	Jan 28, 2008
Code Name	G200b	R680
Fab Process	55 nm	55 nm
Bus	PCIe x16 2.0	PCIe 2.0 x16/(internal PCIe 1.1 x16)
Memory	1024 MB	1024 MB (x2)
Core Speed	648 MHz	825 MHz (x2)
Shader Speed	1476 MHz	(N/A) MHz (x2)
Memory Speed	1242 MHz	1126 MHz (x2)
Unified Shaders	240	320(64x5) (x2)
Texture Mapping Units	80	16 (x2)
Render Output Units	32	16 (x2)
Bus Type	GDDR3	GDDR4
Bus Width	512-bit	256-bit (x2)
DirectX Version	DirectX 10	DirectX 10.1
OpenGL Version	OpenGL 3.1	OpenGL 3.0
Power (Max TDP)	204 watts	(N/A) watts
Shader Model	4.0	4.1
Bandwidth	158976 MB/sec	144128 MB/sec
Texel Rate	51840 Mtexels/sec	26400 Mtexels/sec
Pixel Rate	20736 Mpixels/sec	26400 Mpixels/sec

Memory Bandwidth: Memory bandwidth is the maximum amount of data (counted in megabytes per second) that can be transferred over the external memory interface within a second. It is calculated by multiplying the bus width by its memory clock speed. If the card has DDR RAM, the result should be multiplied by 2 once again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The better the memory bandwidth, the better 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 in one second. This number is worked out by multiplying the total amount of texture units of the card by the core clock speed of the chip. The higher this number, the better the card will be at handling texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels processed in a second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum number of pixels that the graphics chip could possibly write to its local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is calculated by multiplying the number of colour ROPs by the the card's clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also called Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel fill rate also depends on quite a few other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the ability to get to the maximum fill rate.