GeForce GTX 285 1GB vs Radeon HD 7870 XT

Intro

Compare that to the Radeon HD 7870 XT, which makes use of a 28 nm design. AMD has clocked the core frequency at 925 MHz. The GDDR5 RAM is set to run at a speed of 1500 MHz on this specific card. It features 1536 SPUs as well as 96 TAUs and 32 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon HD 7870 XT		185 Watts
GeForce GTX 285 1GB		204 Watts
	Difference: 19 Watts (10%)

Memory Bandwidth

Performance-wise, the Radeon HD 7870 XT should theoretically be a lot superior to the GeForce GTX 285 1GB overall. (explain)

Radeon HD 7870 XT		192000 MB/sec
GeForce GTX 285 1GB		158976 MB/sec
	Difference: 33024 (21%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 7870 XT will be a lot (more or less 71%) better at anisotropic filtering than the GeForce GTX 285 1GB. (explain)

Radeon HD 7870 XT		88800 Mtexels/sec
GeForce GTX 285 1GB		51840 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 36960 (71%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon HD 7870 XT will be much (approximately 43%) more effective at full screen anti-aliasing than the GeForce GTX 285 1GB, and also should be able to handle higher screen resolutions better. (explain)

Radeon HD 7870 XT		29600 Mpixels/sec
GeForce GTX 285 1GB		20736 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 8864 (43%)

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 max amount of data (in units of megabytes per second) that can be transferred over the external memory interface within a second. It's calculated by multiplying the interface width by its memory clock speed. In the case of DDR memory, the result should be multiplied by 2 once 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, HDR and high resolutions.

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

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum number of pixels that the graphics card can possibly write to its local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is calculated by multiplying the number of colour ROPs by the clock speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - aka Render Output Units) are responsible for drawing the pixels (image) on the screen. The actual pixel output rate also depends on many other factors, especially the memory bandwidth - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the ability to reach the max fill rate.