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GeForce GTX 970M vs Radeon HD 3870 X2 512MB

Intro

The GeForce GTX 970M has a GPU clock speed of 924 MHz, and the 3072 MB of GDDR5 RAM runs at 1000 MHz through a 192-bit bus. It also is comprised of 1280 Stream Processors, 80 TAUs, and 48 Raster Operation Units.

Compare all that to the Radeon HD 3870 X2 512MB, which comes with GPU core speed of 825 MHz, and 512 MB of GDDR3 RAM set to run at 900 MHz through a 256-bit bus. It also is made up of 320(64x5) SPUs, 16 Texture Address Units, and 16 ROPs.

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically, the Radeon HD 3870 X2 512MB should perform just a bit faster than the GeForce GTX 970M overall. (explain)

Radeon HD 3870 X2 512MB 115200 MB/sec
GeForce GTX 970M 96000 MB/sec
Difference: 19200 (20%)

Texel Rate

The GeForce GTX 970M will be a lot (more or less 180%) more effective at texture filtering than the Radeon HD 3870 X2 512MB. (explain)

GeForce GTX 970M 73920 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 3870 X2 512MB 26400 Mtexels/sec
Difference: 47520 (180%)

Pixel Rate

If using lots of anti-aliasing is important to you, then the GeForce GTX 970M is the winner, by far. (explain)

GeForce GTX 970M 44352 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 3870 X2 512MB 26400 Mpixels/sec
Difference: 17952 (68%)

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

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GeForce GTX 970M

Amazon.com

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Radeon HD 3870 X2 512MB

Amazon.com

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Please note that the price comparisons are based on search keywords - sometimes it might show cards with very similar names that are not exactly the same as the one chosen in the comparison. We do try to filter out the wrong results as best we can, though.

Specifications

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Model GeForce GTX 970M Radeon HD 3870 X2 512MB
Manufacturer nVidia AMD
Year October 7 2014 Jan 28, 2008
Code Name GM204 R680
Memory 3072 MB 512 MB (x2)
Core Speed 924 MHz 825 MHz (x2)
Memory Speed 4000 MHz 1800 MHz (x2)
Power (Max TDP) 75 watts (Unknown) watts
Bandwidth 96000 MB/sec 115200 MB/sec
Texel Rate 73920 Mtexels/sec 26400 Mtexels/sec
Pixel Rate 44352 Mpixels/sec 26400 Mpixels/sec
Unified Shaders 1280 320(64x5) (x2)
Texture Mapping Units 80 16 (x2)
Render Output Units 48 16 (x2)
Bus Type GDDR5 GDDR3
Bus Width 192-bit 256-bit (x2)
Fab Process 28 nm 55 nm
Transistors (Unknown) million (Unknown) million
Bus PCIe 3.0 x16 PCIe 2.0 x16/(internal PCIe 1.1 x16)
DirectX Version DirectX 12 DirectX 10.1
OpenGL Version OpenGL 4.5 OpenGL 3.0

Memory Bandwidth: Bandwidth is the largest amount of information (measured in MB per second) that can be transferred over the external memory interface in a second. It's calculated by multiplying the bus width by the speed of its memory. In the case of DDR memory, it must be multiplied by 2 again. If DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The better the card's memory bandwidth, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, HDR and higher screen resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum amount of texture map elements (texels) that can be applied in one second. This is worked out by multiplying the total texture units of the card by the core speed of the chip. The higher the texel rate, 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 number of pixels the graphics card could possibly write to the local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is worked out by multiplying the amount of colour ROPs by the the core clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - aka Render Output Units) are responsible for drawing the pixels (image) on the screen. The actual pixel fill rate also depends on quite a few other factors, especially the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to reach the max fill rate.

Display Prices

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GeForce GTX 970M

Amazon.com

Check prices at:

Radeon HD 3870 X2 512MB

Amazon.com

Check prices at:

Please note that the price comparisons are based on search keywords - sometimes it might show cards with very similar names that are not exactly the same as the one chosen in the comparison. We do try to filter out the wrong results as best we can, though.

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