Radeon HD 3870 1GB vs Radeon HD 6970

Intro

Compare those specs to the Radeon HD 6970, which uses a 40 nm design. AMD has set the core frequency at 880 MHz. The GDDR5 memory works at a speed of 1375 MHz on this model. It features 1536 SPUs along with 96 Texture Address Units and 32 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon HD 3870 1GB		106 Watts
Radeon HD 6970		250 Watts
	Difference: 144 Watts (136%)

Memory Bandwidth

The Radeon HD 6970 should in theory perform quite a bit faster than the Radeon HD 3870 1GB overall. (explain)

Radeon HD 6970		176000 MB/sec
Radeon HD 3870 1GB		72000 MB/sec
	Difference: 104000 (144%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 6970 will be quite a bit (approximately 581%) better at AF than the Radeon HD 3870 1GB. (explain)

Radeon HD 6970		84480 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 3870 1GB		12400 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 72080 (581%)

Pixel Rate

If using lots of anti-aliasing is important to you, then the Radeon HD 6970 is the winner, by far. (explain)

Radeon HD 6970		28160 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 3870 1GB		12400 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 15760 (127%)

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 largest amount of information (in units of megabytes per second) that can be transferred over the external memory interface in a second. The number is worked out by multiplying the card's bus width by its memory speed. In the case of DDR RAM, the result should be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The better the bandwidth is, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, HDR and higher screen resolutions.

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

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum number of pixels that the graphics card can possibly record to its local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is worked out by multiplying the amount of colour ROPs by the the card's clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - aka Render Output Units) are responsible for drawing the pixels (image) on the screen. The actual pixel output rate is also dependant on many other factors, especially the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the ability to reach the max fill rate.