GeForce GTX 570 vs Radeon HD 3870 1GB

Intro

Compare those specs to the Radeon HD 3870 1GB, which has core clock speeds of 775 MHz on the GPU, and 1125 MHz on the 1024 MB of GDDR4 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)

Radeon HD 3870 1GB		106 Watts
GeForce GTX 570		219 Watts
	Difference: 113 Watts (107%)

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically speaking, the GeForce GTX 570 is 111% faster than the Radeon HD 3870 1GB in general, due to its higher data rate. (explain)

GeForce GTX 570		152000 MB/sec
Radeon HD 3870 1GB		72000 MB/sec
	Difference: 80000 (111%)

Texel Rate

The GeForce GTX 570 will be much (approximately 254%) faster with regards to texture filtering than the Radeon HD 3870 1GB. (explain)

GeForce GTX 570		43920 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 3870 1GB		12400 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 31520 (254%)

Pixel Rate

The GeForce GTX 570 is a lot (more or less 136%) better at AA than the Radeon HD 3870 1GB, and also capable of handling higher resolutions without slowing down too much. (explain)

GeForce GTX 570		29280 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 3870 1GB		12400 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 16880 (136%)

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: Bandwidth is the maximum amount of information (measured in MB per second) that can be moved past the external memory interface in a second. It is worked out by multiplying the bus width by its memory speed. If it uses DDR type memory, it should be multiplied by 2 once again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The better the card's memory bandwidth, 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 amount of texture map elements (texels) that are processed in one second. This number is calculated by multiplying the total texture units by the core clock speed of the chip. The higher this number, the better the video card will be at texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels applied per second.

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