GeForce GTX 550 Ti vs Radeon HD 3870 X2 512MB

Intro

Compare all that to the Radeon HD 3870 X2 512MB, which comes with core clock 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 TAUs and 16 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Memory Bandwidth

In theory, the Radeon HD 3870 X2 512MB should be 17% quicker than the GeForce GTX 550 Ti in general, due to its higher bandwidth. (explain)

Radeon HD 3870 X2 512MB		115200 MB/sec
GeForce GTX 550 Ti		98496 MB/sec
	Difference: 16704 (17%)

Texel Rate

The GeForce GTX 550 Ti will be a little bit (about 9%) more effective at AF than the Radeon HD 3870 X2 512MB. (explain)

GeForce GTX 550 Ti		28800 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 3870 X2 512MB		26400 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 2400 (9%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon HD 3870 X2 512MB will be quite a bit (about 22%) faster with regards to AA than the GeForce GTX 550 Ti, and also able to handle higher resolutions without losing too much performance. (explain)

Radeon HD 3870 X2 512MB		26400 Mpixels/sec
GeForce GTX 550 Ti		21600 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 4800 (22%)

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: Memory bandwidth is the max amount of data (counted in megabytes per second) that can be moved across the external memory interface in a second. It's calculated by multiplying the card's bus width by its memory speed. If the card has DDR RAM, it should be multiplied by 2 once again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher the card's 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 are processed per second. This figure is worked out by multiplying the total amount of texture units by the core clock speed of the chip. The better this number, the better the graphics 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 amount of pixels that the graphics chip can possibly record to its local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is worked out by multiplying the number of Raster Operations Pipelines by the the card's clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - sometimes also referred to as Render Output Units) are responsible for filling the screen with pixels (the image). The actual pixel rate is also dependant on many other factors, especially the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the potential to get to the maximum fill rate.