Radeon HD 3870 X2 512MB vs Radeon HD 6570 (OEM) 1GB

Intro

Compare those specs to the Radeon HD 6570 (OEM) 1GB, which features a clock speed of 650 MHz and a GDDR3 memory speed of 900 MHz. It also uses a 128-bit memory bus, and makes use of a 40 nm design. It is comprised of 480 SPUs, 24 Texture Address Units, and 8 Raster Operation Units.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically speaking, the Radeon HD 3870 X2 512MB is 300% quicker than the Radeon HD 6570 (OEM) 1GB in general, due to its greater bandwidth. (explain)

Radeon HD 3870 X2 512MB		115200 MB/sec
Radeon HD 6570 (OEM) 1GB		28800 MB/sec
	Difference: 86400 (300%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 3870 X2 512MB should be quite a bit (approximately 69%) more effective at anisotropic filtering than the Radeon HD 6570 (OEM) 1GB. (explain)

Radeon HD 3870 X2 512MB		26400 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 6570 (OEM) 1GB		15600 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 10800 (69%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon HD 3870 X2 512MB is a lot (more or less 408%) faster with regards to FSAA than the Radeon HD 6570 (OEM) 1GB, and capable of handling higher resolutions better. (explain)

Radeon HD 3870 X2 512MB		26400 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 6570 (OEM) 1GB		5200 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 21200 (408%)

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 moved past the external memory interface within a second. It's calculated by multiplying the card's bus width by the speed of its memory. If it uses DDR type memory, the result should be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher the bandwidth is, 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 number of texture map elements (texels) that are applied in one second. This figure is calculated by multiplying the total amount of texture units of the card by the core speed of the chip. The better this number, the better the graphics card will be at texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels per second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels the graphics card can possibly write to the local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is worked out by multiplying the number of ROPs by the the card's clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - sometimes also referred to as Render Output Units) are responsible for drawing the pixels (image) on the screen. The actual pixel fill rate also depends on lots of other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to get to the maximum fill rate.