Radeon HD 3870 512MB vs Radeon HD 6670 (OEM)

Intro

The Radeon HD 3870 512MB uses a 55 nm design. AMD has clocked the core frequency at 775 MHz. The GDDR3 memory is set to run at a frequency of 900 MHz on this particular card. It features 320(64x5) SPUs along with 16 Texture Address Units and 16 Rasterization Operator Units.

Compare all that to the Radeon HD 6670 (OEM), which comes with a GPU core clock speed of 800 MHz, and 512 MB of GDDR5 RAM set to run at 1000 MHz through a 128-bit bus. It also is comprised of 480 Stream Processors, 24 Texture Address Units, and 8 ROPs.

Price Comparison

Specifications

Memory Bandwidth: Memory bandwidth is the largest amount of information (in units of MB per second) that can be transported over the external memory interface in one second. It's worked out by multiplying the interface width by the speed of its memory. If it uses DDR type RAM, the result should be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The better the memory bandwidth, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, High Dynamic Range and higher screen resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum number of texture map elements (texels) that can be applied in one second. This figure is worked out by multiplying the total texture units by the core clock speed of the chip. The better this number, the better the card will be at handling texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels applied per second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum amount of pixels the graphics card can possibly record to its local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate 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 outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel output rate is also dependant on lots of other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to get to the max fill rate.