GeForce 9800 GX2 vs Radeon HD 3870 1GB

Intro

Compare that to the Radeon HD 3870 1GB, which comes with clock speeds of 775 MHz on the GPU, and 1125 MHz on the 1024 MB of GDDR4 RAM. 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)

Radeon HD 3870 1GB		106 Watts
GeForce 9800 GX2		197 Watts
	Difference: 91 Watts (86%)

Memory Bandwidth

The GeForce 9800 GX2, in theory, should perform quite a bit faster than the Radeon HD 3870 1GB overall. (explain)

GeForce 9800 GX2		128000 MB/sec
Radeon HD 3870 1GB		72000 MB/sec
	Difference: 56000 (78%)

Texel Rate

The GeForce 9800 GX2 should be much (more or less 519%) more effective at anisotropic filtering than the Radeon HD 3870 1GB. (explain)

GeForce 9800 GX2		76800 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 3870 1GB		12400 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 64400 (519%)

Pixel Rate

If using high levels of AA is important to you, then the GeForce 9800 GX2 is a better choice, by a large margin. (explain)

GeForce 9800 GX2		19200 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 3870 1GB		12400 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 6800 (55%)

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 (counted in megabytes per second) that can be transferred past the external memory interface in a second. It is worked out by multiplying the interface width by the speed of its memory. If the card has DDR memory, it must be multiplied by 2 once again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The better the card's memory bandwidth, 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 processed per second. This is calculated by multiplying the total texture units of the card 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 applied in one 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 amount of Render Output Units by the the core speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - sometimes also referred to as 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 ability to reach the maximum fill rate.