GeForce GT 320 vs Radeon HD 3870 512MB

Intro

Compare all of that to the Radeon HD 3870 512MB, which comes with clock speeds of 775 MHz on the GPU, and 900 MHz on the 512 MB of GDDR3 RAM. It features 320(64x5) SPUs as well as 16 TAUs and 16 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce GT 320		43 Watts
Radeon HD 3870 512MB		106 Watts
	Difference: 63 Watts (147%)

Memory Bandwidth

Performance-wise, the Radeon HD 3870 512MB should theoretically be quite a bit superior to the GeForce GT 320 in general. (explain)

Radeon HD 3870 512MB		57600 MB/sec
GeForce GT 320		25280 MB/sec
	Difference: 32320 (128%)

Texel Rate

The GeForce GT 320 will be a little bit (approximately 5%) faster with regards to anisotropic filtering than the Radeon HD 3870 512MB. (explain)

GeForce GT 320		12960 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 3870 512MB		12400 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 560 (5%)

Pixel Rate

If using a high screen resolution is important to you, then the Radeon HD 3870 512MB is a better choice, by a large margin. (explain)

Radeon HD 3870 512MB		12400 Mpixels/sec
GeForce GT 320		4320 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 8080 (187%)

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 information (in units of MB per second) that can be moved across the external memory interface within a second. It's worked out by multiplying the interface width by its memory clock speed. 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 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 texture map elements (texels) that can be processed per second. This is worked out by multiplying the total amount of texture units of the card by the core 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 processed per second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum amount of pixels the video card could possibly record to the 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 clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also called Render Output Units) are responsible for drawing the pixels (image) on the screen. The actual pixel output rate is also dependant on quite a few other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the potential to reach the maximum fill rate.