Radeon HD 3870 512MB vs Radeon HD 6970

Intro

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

Compare all that to the Radeon HD 6970, which uses a 40 nm design. AMD has set the core speed at 880 MHz. The GDDR5 memory works at a speed of 1375 MHz on this model. It features 1536 SPUs as well as 96 TAUs and 32 ROPs.

Price Comparison

Specifications

Memory Bandwidth: Bandwidth is the maximum amount of information (in units of megabytes per second) that can be moved past the external memory interface within a second. It is calculated by multiplying the card's interface width by its memory clock speed. In the case of DDR type memory, it should be multiplied by 2 once again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The better the card's 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 processed per second. This number is worked out by multiplying the total amount of texture units of the card by the core speed of the chip. The higher this number, the better the graphics card will be at texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels processed in a second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels that the graphics card can possibly write to its local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is worked out by multiplying the amount of colour ROPs 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 rate is also dependant on quite a few other factors, especially the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the potential to reach the maximum fill rate.