GeForce 9800 GTX+ vs Radeon HD 3870 512MB

Intro

Compare all that to the Radeon HD 3870 512MB, which comes with GPU clock speed of 775 MHz, and 512 MB of GDDR3 RAM running at 900 MHz through a 256-bit bus. It also features 320(64x5) Stream Processors, 16 Texture Address Units, and 16 Raster Operation Units.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon HD 3870 512MB		106 Watts
GeForce 9800 GTX+		145 Watts
	Difference: 39 Watts (37%)

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically, the GeForce 9800 GTX+ should perform much faster than the Radeon HD 3870 512MB overall. (explain)

GeForce 9800 GTX+		70400 MB/sec
Radeon HD 3870 512MB		57600 MB/sec
	Difference: 12800 (22%)

Texel Rate

The GeForce 9800 GTX+ will be a lot (more or less 281%) better at anisotropic filtering than the Radeon HD 3870 512MB. (explain)

GeForce 9800 GTX+		47232 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 3870 512MB		12400 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 34832 (281%)

Pixel Rate

If running with a high screen resolution is important to you, then the Radeon HD 3870 512MB is superior to the GeForce 9800 GTX+, not by a very large margin though. (explain)

Radeon HD 3870 512MB		12400 Mpixels/sec
GeForce 9800 GTX+		11808 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 592 (5%)

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 largest amount of information (measured in megabytes per second) that can be transferred past the external memory interface within a second. It's calculated by multiplying the bus width by its memory speed. If it uses DDR type RAM, the result should be multiplied by 2 once 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 high resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum number of texture map elements (texels) that can be processed in one second. This number is calculated by multiplying the total amount of texture units by the core clock speed of the chip. The better the texel rate, the better the video card will be at texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels applied in a second.

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