GeForce GT 320 vs Radeon HD 3870 X2 512MB

Intro

Compare all that to the Radeon HD 3870 X2 512MB, which features core speeds of 825 MHz on the GPU, and 900 MHz on the 512 MB of GDDR3 RAM. It features 320(64x5) SPUs along with 16 Texture Address Units and 16 Rasterization Operator Units.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Memory Bandwidth

As far as performance goes, the Radeon HD 3870 X2 512MB should theoretically be quite a bit better than the GeForce GT 320 in general. (explain)

Radeon HD 3870 X2 512MB		115200 MB/sec
GeForce GT 320		25280 MB/sec
	Difference: 89920 (356%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 3870 X2 512MB is quite a bit (approximately 104%) more effective at AF than the GeForce GT 320. (explain)

Radeon HD 3870 X2 512MB		26400 Mtexels/sec
GeForce GT 320		12960 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 13440 (104%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon HD 3870 X2 512MB should be quite a bit (approximately 511%) better at anti-aliasing than the GeForce GT 320, and able to handle higher resolutions more effectively. (explain)

Radeon HD 3870 X2 512MB		26400 Mpixels/sec
GeForce GT 320		4320 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 22080 (511%)

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: Bandwidth is the max amount of information (in units of MB per second) that can be transferred over the external memory interface within a second. It's calculated by multiplying the bus width by its memory speed. If the card has DDR RAM, the result should be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The higher 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 amount of texture map elements (texels) that can be applied in one second. This is calculated by multiplying the total number of texture units of the card by the core clock speed of the chip. The better this number, the better the video card will be at handling texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels applied in a second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum number of pixels that the graphics card could possibly record to the local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is worked out by multiplying the amount of colour ROPs by the clock speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also called Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel rate is also dependant on lots of other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to reach the maximum fill rate.