Radeon HD 3870 1GB vs Radeon HD 6770

Intro

Compare those specs to the Radeon HD 6770, which comes with core clock speeds of 900 MHz on the GPU, and 1050 MHz on the 512 MB of GDDR5 RAM. It features 800 SPUs as well as 40 Texture Address Units 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
Radeon HD 6770		108 Watts
	Difference: 2 Watts (2%)

Memory Bandwidth

The Radeon HD 3870 1GB should in theory perform a small bit faster than the Radeon HD 6770 in general. (explain)

Radeon HD 3870 1GB		72000 MB/sec
Radeon HD 6770		67200 MB/sec
	Difference: 4800 (7%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 6770 will be quite a bit (approximately 190%) more effective at texture filtering than the Radeon HD 3870 1GB. (explain)

Radeon HD 6770		36000 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 3870 1GB		12400 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 23600 (190%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon HD 6770 is just a bit (more or less 16%) faster with regards to FSAA than the Radeon HD 3870 1GB, and also able to handle higher resolutions better. (explain)

Radeon HD 6770		14400 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 3870 1GB		12400 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 2000 (16%)

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: Memory bandwidth is the maximum amount of data (in units of MB per second) that can be transported over the external memory interface in a second. It's worked out by multiplying the card's bus width by the speed of its memory. If the card has DDR memory, it should be multiplied by 2 again. If DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The higher the bandwidth is, 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 texture map elements (texels) that are applied per second. This figure is calculated 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 video card will be at handling 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 per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is calculated by multiplying the number of ROPs by the the core speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - sometimes also referred to as Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel output rate also depends 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 maximum fill rate.