GeForce GTX 570 vs Radeon HD 3870 X2 512MB

Intro

Compare all of that to the Radeon HD 3870 X2 512MB, which makes use of a 55 nm design. AMD has set the core frequency at 825 MHz. The GDDR3 memory runs at a frequency of 900 MHz on this card. It features 320(64x5) SPUs along with 16 Texture Address Units and 16 ROPs.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Memory Bandwidth

The GeForce GTX 570, in theory, should perform much faster than the Radeon HD 3870 X2 512MB in general. (explain)

GeForce GTX 570		152000 MB/sec
Radeon HD 3870 X2 512MB		115200 MB/sec
	Difference: 36800 (32%)

Texel Rate

The GeForce GTX 570 should be much (more or less 66%) more effective at AF than the Radeon HD 3870 X2 512MB. (explain)

GeForce GTX 570		43920 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 3870 X2 512MB		26400 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 17520 (66%)

Pixel Rate

If running with a high resolution is important to you, then the GeForce GTX 570 is superior to the Radeon HD 3870 X2 512MB, not by a very large margin though. (explain)

GeForce GTX 570		29280 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 3870 X2 512MB		26400 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 2880 (11%)

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 maximum amount of information (counted in MB per second) that can be moved over the external memory interface in one second. The number is calculated by multiplying the bus width by its memory speed. If the card has DDR type RAM, it should be multiplied by 2 once again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The better the memory bandwidth, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, HDR and high resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum amount of texture map elements (texels) that are processed per second. This is calculated by multiplying the total amount of texture units 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 applied in a second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels that the graphics chip can possibly record to its local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is worked out by multiplying the number of ROPs by the clock speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - aka Render Output Units) are responsible for filling the screen with pixels (the image). The actual pixel rate also depends on quite a few other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the ability to reach the max fill rate.