Radeon HD 3870 512MB vs Radeon HD 6750

Intro

Compare all of that to the Radeon HD 6750, which features clock speeds of 725 MHz on the GPU, and 1000 MHz on the 512 MB of GDDR5 memory. It features 720 SPUs as well as 36 Texture Address Units and 16 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon HD 6750		86 Watts
Radeon HD 3870 512MB		106 Watts
	Difference: 20 Watts (23%)

Memory Bandwidth

In theory, the Radeon HD 6750 is 11% faster than the Radeon HD 3870 512MB overall, because of its greater data rate. (explain)

Radeon HD 6750		64000 MB/sec
Radeon HD 3870 512MB		57600 MB/sec
	Difference: 6400 (11%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 6750 is quite a bit (about 110%) more effective at AF than the Radeon HD 3870 512MB. (explain)

Radeon HD 6750		26100 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 3870 512MB		12400 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 13700 (110%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon HD 3870 512MB will be a bit (about 7%) more effective at full screen anti-aliasing than the Radeon HD 6750, and should be capable of handling higher resolutions better. (explain)

Radeon HD 3870 512MB		12400 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 6750		11600 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 800 (7%)

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 maximum amount of data (measured in MB per second) that can be transferred past the external memory interface in one second. It is calculated by multiplying the card's bus width by its memory clock speed. In the case of DDR type RAM, it must be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher the memory bandwidth, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, High Dynamic Range and higher screen resolutions.

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

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels that the graphics card can possibly write to the local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is calculated by multiplying the amount of colour ROPs by the clock 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 many other factors, especially the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to reach the max fill rate.