GeForce GT 450 (OEM) vs Radeon HD 3870 512MB

Intro

Compare all that to the Radeon HD 3870 512MB, which makes use of 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 card. It features 320(64x5) SPUs as well as 16 Texture Address Units and 16 Rasterization Operator Units.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Both cards have the same power consumption.

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically speaking, the GeForce GT 450 (OEM) should be 67% quicker than the Radeon HD 3870 512MB overall, because of its greater bandwidth. (explain)

GeForce GT 450 (OEM)		96000 MB/sec
Radeon HD 3870 512MB		57600 MB/sec
	Difference: 38400 (67%)

Texel Rate

The GeForce GT 450 (OEM) should be much (more or less 53%) more effective at AF than the Radeon HD 3870 512MB. (explain)

GeForce GT 450 (OEM)		18960 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 3870 512MB		12400 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 6560 (53%)

Pixel Rate

If running with a high screen resolution is important to you, then the GeForce GT 450 (OEM) is a better choice, by a large margin. (explain)

GeForce GT 450 (OEM)		18960 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 3870 512MB		12400 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 6560 (53%)

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 (counted in megabytes per second) that can be moved past the external memory interface in 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 it uses DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The better the memory bandwidth, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, HDR and high resolutions.

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

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum amount of pixels that the graphics chip can possibly record to the local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is worked out by multiplying the number of Raster Operations Pipelines by the the card's clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also sometimes called Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel fill rate also depends on quite a few other factors, especially the memory bandwidth - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to reach the max fill rate.